Abstract
AbstractContemporary approaches suggest that emotions are shaped by culture. Children growing up in different cultures experience culture-specific emotion socialization practices. As a result, children growing up in Western societies (e.g., US or UK) rely on explicit, semantic information, whereas children from East Asian cultures (e.g., China or Japan) are more sensitive towards implicit, contextual cues when confronted with others’ emotions. The aim of the present study was to investigate two aspects of preschoolers’ emotion understanding (emotion recognition and emotion comprehension) in a cross-cultural setting. To this end, Singaporean and German preschoolers were tested with an emotion recognition task employing European-American and East Asian child’s faces and the Test of Emotion Comprehension (TEC; Pons et al., 2004). In total, 129 German and Singaporean preschoolers (mean age 5.34 years) participated. Results indicate that preschoolers were able to recognize emotions of child’s faces above chance level. In line with previous findings, Singaporean preschoolers were more accurate in recognizing emotions from facial stimuli compared to German preschoolers. Accordingly, Singaporean preschoolers outperformed German preschoolers in the Recognition component of the TEC. The overall performance in TEC did not differ between the two samples. Findings of this study provide further evidence that emotion understanding is culturally shaped in accordance with culture-specific emotion socialization practices.
Highlights
We ran a 2 9 2 9 6 ANCOVA with country (Singapore vs. Germany) as a between-subject factor, and stimulus ethnicity (European American (EA) vs. Asian American (AA) faces) and emotion as withinsubject factors on mean unbiased hit rates controlling for age as a covariate
In line with our hypothesis that Singaporean preschoolers would outperform German preschoolers on the emotion recognition task, the analysis revealed a significant main effect of country, F(1, 126) = 32.9, p\.001, gp2 = 0.207
The results of the current work demonstrate that preschoolers’ emotion recognition was influenced by culture, whereas emotion comprehension was comparable between Singapore and Germany
Summary
There is no study investigating both aspects of emotion understanding, emotion recognition and emotion comprehension, in preschoolers within a cross-cultural setting To this end, the present study aimed to fill this gap and extend previous findings by investigating the effect of culture on the development of emotion recognition and emotion comprehension in a high-context and low-context culture with comparable socioeconomic backgrounds: Singapore and Germany. Germany (GER) was chosen as a lowcontext culture comparable to the United States (US) or the United Kingdom (UK) These three countries demonstrate high values on Hofstede’s individualism/collectivism dimension (US 91; UK 89; GER 67), and are considered as individualist cultures. In line with Hall’s (1976) context theory and previous findings demonstrating that Asian children were better at recognizing emotions from faces or vocal information (Kawahara et al, 2021; Yang et al, 2021), we expected Singaporean preschoolers to outperform German preschoolers in the emotion recognition task. In line with previous findings indicating a developmental progression in the TEC with increasing age (e.g., Cavioni et al, 2020; Pons et al, 2004), we expected that preschoolers in the current work would obtain higher global TEC scores with increasing age
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