Emotional regulation across cultures Intergroup and Intergenerational Relation across cultures.
Intro:
An emotion is a feeling such as happiness, love, fear, anger, or hatred, which can be caused by the situation that you are in or the people you are with.
Emotional regulation refers to the ability to control one's emotions. We can control our emotions or our emotions can control us. When our emotions control us, we feel, act and only then think.
Aspect of social emotional regulation.
I. Caring environment
Developing kind, trusting, relationships with responsive caregivers in early childhood settings are essential
II. Emotional knowledge and emotional regulation
· Children at very early age are capable of recognizing basic emotions particularly happy and sad.
· The act of labeling an emotion helps to move it to the language/cognitive part of brain.
· This creates a space between feeling and action which ultimately helps children to process feelings in a matter that is more cognitive than reactive.
III. Social Understanding
· At the age of four children begin to understand that others have internal worlds where they keep feelings and thoughts, and that certain events/actions are causes for certain emotional reactions.
IV. Relationship management
· The knowledge of social norms influences the interaction between children. For example, it helps a child how to express emotions effectively or to respond to problems.
V. Social responsibility
· The goal of social emotional education is to enable children to be internally motivated to act kindly; and to develop a system of ethical values directed toward feeling for others.
Emotional regulation across cultures.
Through emotional socialization, individuals learn to express, understand, and regulate emotion during childhood and these abilities are closely linked to social interactions of children. Emotions are learned within the family too, where parents play a primary role and children learn about emotions and emotion regulation through their parents’ responses to their emotions.
Heuristic model
By put forth parental emotion-related socialization behaviors are influenced by both the characteristics of the (1) child, (2) the parent, (3) the culture and the aspects of the specific context in which they occur. For example, such parental emotion-related socialization behaviors include parental reactions to children’s emotional expressions, discussions regarding emotions with children and parental emotional expressiveness, which can be used to teach children and model appropriate emotional control and expression in accordance with situational demands. Consequently, these parental emotion-related socialization behaviors are likely to have an effect on (i) emotional experience, (ii) emotional expression, (iii) emotion regulation and emotion-related behavior, (iv) acquisition of regulatory processes, (v) understanding of emotions and emotion regulation, (vi) quality of the parent-child relationship and (vii) schemas about the self, relationships and the world. The impact of parents on children’s emotional processes are familiar from empirical studies, which found that positive, supportive parental interactions (i.e. warm, sensitive responses) to children’s emotions are associated with (i) emotional competence , (ii) positive emotion self-awareness and (iii) children’s emotion regulation.
Conversely, negative, unsupportive parental reactions
(I.e. punitive or dismissive responses) are associated with
(i) Emotion deregulation,
(ii) Socially incompetent behavior
(iii) Social maladjustment.
Thus, parents, their parenting styles, and parent-child interactions are crucial in the emotional development and abilities of children. Parental criticism in response to children’s behavior is an example of parental emotion related socialization, where criticism can be defined as negative evaluative feedback received from other people in social interactions. Often construed as an unpleasant experience, negative emotional reactions towards criticism are considered normative, in that people are inclined to feel threatened by criticism, observable not just in one or two social contexts but in numerous aspects of life. In this view, criticism can be seen as a threat to the need for social belonging, or the fundamental human need that drives social bonding and the formation of attachments, interactions and relationships. As a result, criticism, when construed negatively by the receiver, is a distressing experience which activates emotions and thoughts such as feeling upset or hurt, indicating its nature as a form of hurtful communication. Given that negative emotion reactions tend to be a normative response towards criticism and parents play a key role in emotional socialization, it can be expected that differences in parenting styles would influence how individuals perceive and respond to criticism in their social interactions.
Cultural differences in emotional arousal level
Cross-cultural differences in emotional arousal level have consistently been found. Western culture is related to high arousal emotions, whereas Eastern culture is related to low arousal emotions. These cultural differences are explained by the distinct characteristics of individualist and collectivist cultures. In Western culture, people try to influence others. For this purpose, high arousal emotions are ideal and effective. By contrast, in Eastern culture, adjusting and conforming to other people is considered desirable. To meet this goal, low arousal emotions work better than high arousal emotions.
In fact, in terms of positively valenced emotions, the arousal level of ideal affect differs by cultures. Ideal affect, or “affective state that people ideally want to feel” (is important because people are motivated to behave in certain ways so that they feel the emotions they want to experience. Therefore, people in certain culture tend to experience the emotional state that are considered to be ideal in their culture. Tsai36 argued that Westerners value high arousal emotions more than Easterners, so they promote activities that elicit high arousal emotions. Actually, Americans, compared with East-Asians, are reported to prefer high arousal emotional states such as excitement or enthusiasm. Even children of the West learn through storybooks that high arousal emotions are ideal, and the opposite is true for children of the East. Conception of happiness is also different in arousal level by culture. Lu and Gilmour40 conducted a cross-cultural study on the conception of happiness; they found that the American conception of happiness emphasized on being upbeat, whereas the Chinese conception of happiness focused on being solemn and reserved. This means that, in America, high arousal positive emotional states are considered as happiness, a desirable state. By contrast, low arousal positive emotional states are considered as happiness in China. This was replicated in another study. Uchida and Kitayama showed that Japanese people conceptualized happiness as experiencing low arousal positive emotions more than high arousal positive emotions, and it was vice versa for American people.
Owing to the cultural difference in the norm about emotional arousal level, differences in the actual arousal levels of emotional experience also emerge. In fact, Kacen and Lee conducted a cross-cultural study comparing Caucasians and Asians. Researchers used an arousal scale composed of four bipolar items, which consists of emotion adjectives representing different arousal levels. Emotion items in the arousal scale were stimulated–relaxed (reversed), calm–excited, frenzied–sluggish (reversed), and unaroused–aroused. The result showed that Caucasians were more likely to be in high arousal emotional states (i.e., stimulated, excited, frenzied, and aroused) than Asians, whereas Asians were more likely to be in low arousal emotional states (i.e., relaxed, calm, sluggish, and unaroused). In addition, Tsai and colleagues reported that the closer the participants to American rather than Chinese cultural orientation, the higher their cardiovascular arousal level during interpersonal tasks.
Culture is a huge factor in determining whether we look someone in the eye or the kisser to interpret facial expressions, according to a new study.
For instance, in Japan, people tend to look to the eyes for emotional cues, whereas Americans tend to look to the mouth, says researcher Masaki Yuki, a behavioral scientist at Hokkaido University in Japan.
This could be because the Japanese, when in the presence of others, try to suppress their emotions more than Americans do, he said.
Intergroup culture
Intergroup relations refers to the way in which people who belong to social groups or categories perceive, think about, feel about, and act towards and interact with people in other groups.
Intergroup relations refer to interactions between individuals in different social groups, and to interactions taking place between the groups themselves collectively. It has long been a subject of research in social psychology, political psychology, and organizational behavior. Whenever individuals belonging to one group interact, collectively or individually, with another group or its members in terms of their group identification, we have an instance of intergroup behavior.
Intergenerational culture.
The intergenerational transmission of culture refers to the way values, knowledge, and practices that are prevalent in one generation are transferred to the next generation. Cultural transmission, thus, is seen as a process by which the reproduction of culture occurs in each successive generation. An intergenerational theory would focus equal attention on the potential development of both members of an intergenerational dyad to learn as a function of a social interaction. The definition of intergenerational is something where multiple generations of people intermingle or come together. An example of intergenerational is a household where a great grandmother, grandmother, parents and child all live together.
Intergenerational relationship?
Image result for intergroup and intergenerational relations across cultures Intergenerational relationships refer to the chain of relationships between aging parents, adult children, grandchildren and even great-grandchildren. There's certain reciprocity between each family member that benefits each of the generations. Intergenerational relationships allows both groups to learn about each other's differences and similarities while building relational capacity and a sense of fulfillment. Social bonding can support youth and aging adults through a variety of enjoyable activities that encourage and engage both groups.
Intergenerational relations across cultures
"Within cultures we all differ within our beliefs, habits, knowledge and skills, as this influences our intergenerational relationships, we differ from other cultures"
Within both Western and East Asian cultures we experience different intergenerational relationships, in many ways such as attitudes, norms and communication.
Four Western (Australia, New Zealand, United States and Canada) and four Southeast Asian (Japan, Hong Kong, South Korea, and The Philippines) showed that they all have filial responsibility, specifically for females. The difference being that Asian families would do it in a more instrumental support way, such as helping them financially. Where Western families would support their elders through communication, like listening to their elders or actually being in contact with them. In Asia, elders as viewed as powerful and very respected, which is why later in life their offspring take the responsibility to care for their elders in Japan, especially for the eldest son. With that being said, culture in East Asia has been influenced to support filial piety.
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