Title: Culture, parent child conversation, and children's understanding of emotions
Description: An accumulating literature indicates the important role that language plays in the early development of children's understanding of key element of our mental life, especially emotion. Recent cross-cultural studies suggest that American and Chinese mothers tend to engage in different types of conversations with their children, reflected in both content and style (Bruner, 1990; Nelson, 1992, 1993; Pillemer & White, 1989, Wang, Leichtmen, & Davies, 2000; Wang & Leitchmen, 2000). In particular, when talking about past emotionally charged experiences, American mothers tend to focus on the children's emotional reaction itself and encourage the child to elaborate why and how such a feeling occurred. Chinese mothers, however, tend to comment on children's emotions in terms of their appropriateness and employ conversation as a way to teach proper behavior and moral lessons (Wang, 2001). Given these differences in parent-child conversation, I speculate that American mother's frequent talk about thoughts and feelings, as well as helping children to articulate their own emotions and feelings might facilitate young children's early discovery of the mental causes of emotion, notably the way in which reminders can re-activate a past emotion. In contrast, Chinese mother's focus on the behavioral standards and moral correctness might help children's early understanding of moral emotions, such as guilt, shame, and pride.

This thesis contains three studies investigating the role of culture and language plays in children's emotion understanding. Study 1 examines the development of understanding memory-emotion connection among American and Chinese children. American children showed an earlier understanding of the impact of memory on emotion compared with Chinese children. Study 2 examines the development of understanding moral emotions across cultures. Chinese children showed an earlier understanding of shame and pride in scenarios where desire and rules conflict. Study 3 is a training study testing the role of language in promoting children's understanding of moral emotions. This study proved the effectiveness of appropriate language input that reveals the story character's mental processes in helping children's understanding of moral emotions. Taken together, these three studies reveal how culture is involved in the development of children's emotion understanding through language.
Subjects: Cognition in children, Cross-cultural studies, Child Development, Emotion in children, Ethnopsychology