Abstract
<p>Research on children’s Emotion Understanding (EU) has been dominated by middle-class samples from Western societies. We studied cultural and Socioeconomic Status (SES) variation in young children’s EU in a high SES sample (n = 50) and a low SES sample (n = 50) of Brazilian preschoolers using the Test of Emotion Comprehension. We found that the high SES sample performed better at both the overall and component levels than the low SES sample on EU. The differences were especially substantial for the recognition of basic emotions, with the low SES children recognizing negative emotions better than positive and neutral emotions. In addition, we compared the two SES samples of Brazilian children to same-age samples from Norway, Italy and Peru. Between the Brazilian and the European samples and the Brazilian and other non-European samples, the variation in EU was observed to be more related to SES than to culture.</p>
Highlights
The development of children’s Emotion Understanding (EU) is likely to be affected by the cultural and socioeconomic context the child grows up in
The results from this study showed that the main differences in EU between the Brazilian and European children and between the Brazilian and non-European children were related to Socioeconomic Status (SES) rather than to culture
This finding may confirm the assumption that SES has an effect on children’s EU that is partly independent of culture
Summary
The development of children’s Emotion Understanding (EU) is likely to be affected by the cultural and socioeconomic context the child grows up in. Different cultures may promote or constrain aspects of children’s EU through cultural norms and values. Chen (2009) argues that examining developmental patterns of socio-emotional functioning from the within-cultural perspective provides a foundation for cross-cultural comparisons. The goal of this study was to examine whether cross-cultural differences in young children’s EU are due to differences in the cultural or SES status of the children. Harris (1989) states that it is important to differentiate between the development of children’s behavioral expression and conscious acknowledgement (or understanding) of emotions. This is because the child’s experience of emotions happens at an earlier age than the conscious awareness of what they are feeling
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