Abstract
Children's books may provide an important resource of culturally appropriate emotions. This study investigates emotion displays in children's storybooks for preschoolers from Romania, Turkey, and the US in order to analyze cultural norms of emotions. We derived some hypotheses by referring to cross-cultural studies about emotion and emotion socialization. For such media analyses, the frequency rate of certain emotion displays can be seen as an indicator for the salience of the specific emotion. We expected that all children's storybooks would highlight dominantly positive emotions and that US children's storybooks would display negative powerful emotions (e.g., anger) more often and negative powerless emotions (e.g., sadness) less often than Turkish and Romanian storybooks. We also predicted that the positive and negative powerful emotion expressions would be more intense in the US storybooks compared to the other storybooks. Finally, we expected that social context (ingroup/outgroup) may affect the intensity emotion displays more in Turkish and Romanian storybooks compared to US storybooks. Illustrations in 30 popular children's storybooks (10 for each cultural group) were coded. Results mostly confirmed the hypotheses but also pointed to differences between Romanian and Turkish storybooks. Overall, the study supports the conclusion that culture-specific emotion norms are reflected in media to which young children are exposed.
Highlights
EMOTION DISPLAYS IN MEDIA: A COMPARISON BETWEEN ROMANIAN, TURKISH, AND EURO-AMERICAN CHILDREN’S STORYBOOKS The study of emotion norms is important to better describe and explain cultural differences in emotion socialization
Preliminary analyses examined whether the American, Turkish, and Romanian storybook images were equivalent in terms of the quantity of images, the features of the characters and the contextual setting of the images
Since the number of the book pages did not vary across the three countries, F(2, 27) = 2.59, p = 0.094, the higher numbers of overall images in the Romanian and Turkish books is due to the presence of more people displaying emotions in one scene
Summary
EMOTION DISPLAYS IN MEDIA: A COMPARISON BETWEEN ROMANIAN, TURKISH, AND EURO-AMERICAN CHILDREN’S STORYBOOKS The study of emotion norms is important to better describe and explain cultural differences in emotion socialization. Tsai (2007) demonstrated that Taiwanese Chinese rather prefer low-arousal positive emotions like contentment, whereas European Americans prefer high-arousal positive emotions like excitement; i.e., these two cultural groups differ in the desired (ideal) positive affect. This cultural difference in ideal positive affect was reflected in children’s storybooks of the two cultures (Tsai et al, 2007). These findings suggest that cultural artifacts, such as children’s books, act as one of the specific pathways through which emotion norms are presented and can be culturally transmitted and learned. Children’s storybooks may provide an important resource for children to learn about culturally appropriate emotions
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