Children’s Emotion Knowledge and Internalizing Problems: The Moderating Role of Culture

Abstract

This study examined in a cross-cultural context the prospective relation between children’s emotion knowledge and internalizing problems. European American (N = 33) and immigrant Chinese children (N = 22) and their mothers participated. Children’s emotion knowledge was assessed at three-and-a-half years of age using a task to elicit their understanding of situational antecedents of discrete emotions. Mothers reported on children’s internalizing problems using the Behavior Assessment System Children (BASC) when children were seven years of age. The relation of children’s emotion knowledge to internalizing problems was moderated by culture. Whereas early emotion knowledge was associated with decreased internalizing problems later on for European American children, it was associated with increased internalizing problems for immigrant Chinese children. The findings shed critical light on the different functional meanings of emotion knowledge across cultures.

Keywords

culture emotion emotion knowledge immigrant children internalizing problems

Children’s understanding of emotion is critical for a range of adaptive abilities, including social competence, academic outcomes, and psychological adjustment (for a recent meta-analysis see Trentacosta & Fine, 2010). In assessing emotion knowledge, or emotion situation knowledge, researchers have often looked at children’s ability to grasp and understand emotional cues as well as the situational antecedents and consequences of emotional experiences. This aspect of emotion knowledge is considered to be crucial for developing and maintaining social relations and for achieving emotion regulation competencies (Cicchetti, Ackerman, & Izard, 1995). Research has shown that children with higher levels of emotion knowledge are more empathetic, have higher levels of pro-social behaviors, and are more popular among peers (e.g., Denham & Couchoud, 1991; Dunn & Brown, 1994; Dunn, Brown, & Maguire, 1995; Garner & Waajid, 2012). Furthermore, a host of evidence has also suggested that emotion knowledge serves as an important protective factor against behavioral problems (Dadds, Sanders, Morrison, & Rebetz, 1992; Denham et al., 2000), and that the lack of emotion knowledge may result in increased behavioral problems via direct and indirect pathways (Cicchetti et al., 1995; Denham & Brown, 2010). Of particular importance, emotion knowledge may have a buffering effect on internalizing problems.

Internalizing Problems and Emotion Knowledge

One of the most common forms of child and adolescent psychopathology is the broad class of internalizing problems. Internalizing problems are related to core disturbances in emotion, particularly in intropunitive feelings and moods such as sorrow, guilt, fear, and worry (Zahn-Waxler, Klimes-Dougan, & Slattery, 2000). Children with internalizing problems often experience depression, withdrawal, anxiety, and loneliness, and there is a steep increase in onset of internalizing problems during early school years. Researchers have identified a host of individual, relational, and familial variables responsible for internalizing problems and have proposed remedying factors (Collins, Madsen, Susman-Stillman, & Bornstein, 2002; Rubin, Coplan, & Bowker, 2009; Yap & Jorm, 2015). Pertaining to the current perspective, emotion knowledge may buffer against internalizing problems by providing children with a wealth of information about the emotional meaning of specific situations and thus prepare children for adaptive responses and actions in these situations. It may also allow children to identify strategies to enhance positive experiences and regulate negative feelings (Denham, Blair, DeMulder, Levitas, Sawyer, Auerbach-Major, & Queenan, 2003; Eisenberg, Sadovsky, & Spinrad, 2005; Feldman Barrett, Gross, Christensen, & Benvenuto, 2001; Yang & Wang, 2016). Importantly, children acquire emotion knowledge rapidly during the preschool years (Bennett, Bendersky, & Lewis, 2005; Denham et al., 2003; Dunn & Brown, 1994), which may in turn protect them from developing internalizing problems later on.

Only a few studies to date have directly examined the relation of emotion knowledge to internalizing problems. In a study with seven-year-olds, Schultz and colleagues presented children with story vignettes and asked the children to label the emotion of a protagonist in each story situation (Schultz, Izard, Ackerman, & Youngstrom, 2001). The children’s behavioral problems, including rejection by peers, feelings of social isolation, and social withdrawal, were assessed based on teacher reports using the CBCL-TRF (Achenbach, 1991). It was found that children with higher levels of emotion knowledge were more socially competent and less likely to withdraw from peers. A similar concurrent relation was also found at the preschool age between children’s knowledge of emotion situations and parent-reported internalizing problems (Heinze, Miller, Seifer, Dickstein, & Locke, 2015). Furthermore, in a longitudinal study, Fine and colleagues examined seven-year-old children’s emotion knowledge in relation to their internalizing problems at age 11 (Fine, Izard, Mostow, Trentacosta, & Ackerman, 2003). The emotion knowledge of situations was again assessed in a task asking children to label the emotion of a story protagonist in different vignettes. Internalizing problems were assessed by children’s self-reports of negative emotions, depression, anxiety, and loneliness. The researchers found that emotion knowledge negatively predicted children’s internalizing symptoms four years later. Thus, the extant research has suggested that children with higher levels of emotion knowledge tend to have lower levels of internalizing problems. No study that we know of has examined the longitudinal relation of emotion knowledge in preschool to internalizing problems in early school years when such problems show a steep increase in onset (Collins et al., 2002; Yap & Jorm, 2015).

The research on the role of emotion knowledge in children’s psychological functioning and well-being has significant practical implications. Indeed, the accumulated evidence that emotion knowledge is responsible for a host of positive outcomes has influenced psychotherapeautic interventions (Kendall, Aschenbrand, & Hudson, 2003) and spurred training programs designed to improve children’s emotion knowledge competencies (Greenberg, Kusche, Cook, & Quamma, 1995; Izard et al., 2008). Notably, however, the current body of empirical research has important limitations, where it has focused on children from Western, particularly European American, cultural backgrounds and has largely ignored the role that culture may play in shaping the relation between children’s emotion knowledge and well-being. It has been generally assumed (albeit implicitly) that emotion knowledge is beneficial for social relations and psychological functioning.

Importantly, psychological adjustment is best predicted by the goodness-of-fit between individual characteristics and cultural norms (Caldwell-Harris & Ayçiçegi, 2006; Kristof, 1996; Lerner, 2002; Ward, Furnham & Bochner, 2005). In predicting well-being outcomes, goodness-of-fit models have convincingly demonstrated that it is not individual characteristics but the congruence between these characteristics and environmental (including parental) expectations that promotes adaptive psychological and social functioning (Lerner, 2002). The concept of goodness-of-fit has also been applied to a person-culture fit framework (Caldwell-Harris & Ayçiçegi, 2006; Kristof, 1996). It has been shown that perceived or actual differences between individual characteristics and cultural norms, instead of the characteristics themselves, predict greater difficulties in psychological adjustment, including increased depression and anger (Ward & Searle, 1991), lower life satisfaction, and more physical health problems (Chirkov, Lynch, & Niwa, 2005). Furthermore, there has been an increasing body of research documenting cultural influences on emotion valuation, emotion understanding, and socialization (Matsumoto & Hwang, 2012; Miyamoto & Ryff, 2011; Wang, 2006). As a result, emotion knowledge may serve different functions across cultures and have varied effects on children’s well-being.

Culture and Emotion

In Western, particularly European American, cultures where the self is largely viewed as autonomous and independent of social contexts (Markus & Kitayama, 1991; Triandis, 1989), emotion is considered to be a critical component of personal experience and a salient indicator of one’s distinctiveness from the environment and social world (Halberstadt, Denham & Dunsmore, 2001; Potter, 1988). There is a great cultural emphasis on individual internal attributes such as emotions, preferences, and beliefs, which should be cultivated and should be in line with one’s behaviors (e.g. Kashima, Siegal, Tanaka, & Kashima, 1992; Markus & Kitayama, 1991). Given that an individual’s subjective emotional experience is considered to be more diagnostic of the true self than external behaviors (Andersen, 1984; Andersen & Ross, 1984), emotion signals often serve as effective cues (Clore, Schwarz, & Conway, 1994; Schwarz, 1990; Schwarz & Clore, 1988) that one can use to understand the current state of the self (Schwarz & Clore, 1983), make sense of the ongoing experience (Clore & Parrott, 1994), and ascertain the quality of social relations (Batson, Turk, Shaw, & Klein, 1995). Emotion knowledge is thus critical in this cultural context.

By contrast, in East Asian cultures where there is a paramount concern with social harmony and group interests, a greater cultural emphasis is placed on moderation of all matters of the heart (Mauss, Butler Roberts, & Chu, 2010). Emotion, especially negative emotion, is often viewed as a sign of weakness and a potential disruptor for social cohesion, and therefore needs to be strictly controlled (Cheung, Lau, & Waldman, 1980; Potter, 1988; Russell & Yik, 1996; Wang, 2006; Zheng & Berry, 1991). Furthermore, emotions are viewed as of little importance for one’s sense of self in this cultural context, where “making global-self judgments, to attend exclusively to one’s inner subjective experiences, while neglecting the relational and normal factors of a situation is both inappropriate and ‘unnatural’” (Suh, Diener, Oishi, & Triandis, 1998, p. 483). Instead, cultural norms and the social roles and behaviors of individuals are more informative than individual emotions for the understanding of the self, others, and social situations (Halberstadt et al., 2001; Triandis, 1989; Wang, 2006).

Research on family socialization has provided further evidence for the differential valuations of emotion and emotion knowledge across cultures. In a study with European American and immigrant Chinese families, Doan and Wang (2010) found that, during a story-telling task with their three-year-olds, European American mothers more frequently discussed internal psychological states of story characters, including emotions, than did immigrant Chinese mothers. European Americans mothers also more frequently encouraged and elicited their children’s emotional reactions than did immigrant Chinese mothers, who focused more on labeling and describing the characters’ behaviors. Similarly, in a series of studies examining mother–child conversations about past emotional events, Wang and her colleagues have found that European American mothers frequently elicit children’s opinions of their experiences, affirm their thoughts and feelings, and provide rich explanations for the antecedents of emotions (Fivush & Wang, 2005; Wang, 2001; Wang & Fivush, 2005). By contrast, Chinese mothers often use an “emotion-criticizing style”: They tend not to focus on children’s personal emotions and thoughts, but frequently discuss children’s past wrongdoings and remind children of social norms and behavioral expectations. Perhaps as a consequence of these differences in socialization, studies have shown that Chinese and immigrant Chinese children score lower than their European American peers in the ability to describe situations that would elicit various emotions (Wang, 2008; Wang et al., 2006).

Taken together, having advanced emotion knowledge may be beneficial for psychological functioning for European American children, in line with their cultural and familial emphasis on emotion and emotional understanding (Fine et al., 2003; Garner & Waajid, 2012; Schultz et al., 2001). However, for East Asian children, it may signal excessive focus on inner subjective experiences, which is incongruent with their cultural norms and may, in turn, result in negative consequences. Furthermore, having advanced emotion knowledge may make Asian children more sensitive to the emotional meaning of criticism and social shaming prevalent in Asian family socialization practices (Miller, Wiley, Fung, & Liang, 1997; Suh et al., 1998; Wang & Fivush, 2005), resulting in greater levels of anxiety and depression. This may be particularly true for Asian immigrant children who grow up in a society that emphasizes feeling good about the self and yet continue to be socialized with Asian cultural values and practices (Chao & Tseng, 2002; Doan & Wang, 2010; Eid & Diener, 2001; Wang, 2008).

The Present Study

We investigated in the present study the longitudinal relation of emotion knowledge in preschool to internalizing problems in early school years. We included European American and immigrant Chinese children in the USA to further examine the role of culture in modulating this relation. We assessed children’s emotion knowledge at three-and-a-half years of age using a task to elicit their understanding of situational antecedents of discrete emotions. Children’s internalizing problems were assessed at seven years of age based on maternal reports using the Behavior Assessment System Children (BASC; Reynolds & Kamphaus, 1998). We chose to look at immigrant Chinese children, rather than Chinese children living in China, for two important reasons. First, the one-child policy in China has dramatically influenced the way in which children are raised (Wang, 2008) and would result in a between-group difference where the Chinese children would not have any siblings. Second, having advanced emotion knowledge may have particularly negative effects for immigrant Chinese children who are exposed to contrasting cultural values and practices (Chao & Tseng, 2002; Doan & Wang, 2010; Eid & Diener, 2001).

Based on the goodness-of-fit models and the person-culture fit framework (Caldwell-Harris & Ayçiçegi, 2006; Kristof, 1996), we expected emotion knowledge to have differential relations to internalizing problems in the two cultural groups. Specifically, we expected that, in line with their cultural emphasis on emotion and emotion knowledge, European American children who had advanced emotion knowledge at the preschool age would have fewer internalizing problems when they entered grade school. In contrast, given their cultural emphasis on emotion control and behavioral regulation, having advanced emotion knowledge would put immigrant Chinese children at odds with their cultural norms and family practices and, in turn, lead to more internalizing problems later on.

In addition, past research has suggested that compared with European American adolescents, Asian immigrant adolescents tend to have higher levels of internalizing problems (Chang, 1996; Rhee, Chang, & Rhee, 2003; Zhou, Peverly, Xin, Huang, & Wang, 2003), but show less delinquent behavior (Lorenzo, Pakiz, Reinherz, & Forst, 1995). We therefore included a measure of externalizing problems and controlled for it in analysis.

Methods

Participants

Thirty-three European American children (Time 1 M age = 3.48 years; Time 2 M age = 7.27 years; 15 females) and 22 immigrant Chinese children (Time 1 M age = 3.46 years; Time 2 M age = 7.12 years; 11 females) and their mothers from a university town and suburban areas in upstate New York participated in the study. The study was approved by Cornell University’s Institutional Review Board. The mean ages of the children did not significantly differ between the two cultures. Children were recruited through local preschools and by word of mouth, and were taking part in a larger longitudinal study of socio-cognitive development. All children came from middle-class backgrounds, with the majority of the mothers (immigrant Chinese: 98%; European American: 93%) having a college degree or beyond. The majority of immigrant Chinese families (93%) were originally from Mainland China, with a few from Hong Kong and Taiwan, and most (80%) of the children were born in the USA. An additional group of 51 children, including 30 European American (48%) and 21 immigrant Chinese children (49%) completed only time-one measures. There was no significant difference in any measure, including emotion knowledge, between children who continued to participate the second time three-and-a-half years later, and those who did not.

Procedures

Two female researchers visited mothers and children in their homes when children were on average three-and-a-half and then seven years of age. Chinese-English bilingual researchers visited the immigrant Chinese families and conducted the interview in the language with which the child was most comfortable. The majority of immigrant Chinese children preferred to speak Chinese (Mandarin) at Time 1 and a few of them (N = 7) spoke English or spoke both languages interchangeably. All materials were written in both English and Chinese, and translation and back-translation procedure was carried out to ensure their equivalence in both literal and sense meaning. Before commencing with children’s interviews, the researchers established familiarity and rapport with the children by playing with them and chatting about non-relevant events. During both home visits, mothers were asked to engage the child in a series of free play and semi-structured tasks, followed by a researcher–child session. The entire home visit took approximately two hours and was videotape-recorded. At the end of the session, the children were presented with a small toy to keep. Only the tasks relevant to the current study are described here.

Emotion Knowledge

Emotion knowledge was measured in the current study using an emotion judgment task adapted from Wang (2003), when children were three-and-a-half years of age. The researcher presented the child with 12 short stories, accompanied with pictures and narration, about emotion-eliciting situations with a story protagonist depicted as the child’s age, gender, and ethnicity. After each story presentation, she asked the child to select one out of four emotion faces (happy, sad, fearful, angry) that best showed how the protagonist felt in the story situation. The stories were presented in a random order. The emotion faces were subjected to the MAX facial coding system (Izard, 1979) and presented to children in a pilot study where agreement was 100%. The story situations tap into basic emotions of happiness, sadness, fear, and anger (see Appendix; Wang, 2003) and were generalized by referring to previous research on children’s emotion situation knowledge and prototypical scripts of emotions (e.g., Lewis, 1989; Stein & Liwag, 1997). The faces symbolizing emotions had been pretested and modified to ensure their age and cultural appropriateness, and further validated in previous cross-cultural studies (for more details see Wang, 2003; Wang et al., 2006). The answers were verified based on the consensus judgments of a sample of adults (N = 95) and a sample of mothers (N = 154) of preschool-aged children from European American and Chinese cultures (Wang, 2003). The great majorities of adults of both cultures consistently chose the expected emotional response for each of the stories. A few story situations are likely to elicit different emotions as expected, for example social rejection (Story 12) may make a child feel sad or mad, in which case both “sad” and “mad” responses provided by children were scored as correct. We selected 12 out of the original 20 stories to shorten the task (see Appendix). Children’s total scores indexed their emotion knowledge.

Children’s Internalizing and Externalizing Problems

The child form of the Behavior Assessment System Children (BASC, ages 6–11; Reynolds & Kamphaus, 1998) was used in this study when children were on average seven years of age. Parents rated 138 behaviors on a 4-point scale of frequency (never = 0, sometimes = 1, often = 2, and almost always = 3). Children’s scores for each of the subscales were computed and converted to T-scores. The BASC has established psychometric properties for use with children of diverse ethnic backgrounds (Reynolds & Kamphaus, 1998). For our current sample, internal consistency (Cronbach’s alpha) ranged from .83 to .92 for the broad band behavioral scales. Inter-correlations among BASC scales were in the expected directions, with positive associations among problem scales and negative associations between problem scales and adaptive skill scales.

Because verbal ability has been found to be associated with internalizing problems (Fine et al., 2003), we also assessed language, using the functional subscale in the BASC at Time 2 and included the measure in the multivariate analyses. Finally, mothers reported on their education level. Maternal education was scored 1 = high school, 2 = college, and 3 = post-baccalaureate education.

Results

Table 1 presents the means and standard deviations for all variables across the two cultural groups. The range for the children’s emotion knowledge was 0–11. There was no significant cultural difference in maternal education, age, emotion knowledge, or functional communication. European American children scored higher in externalizing problems than did their immigrant Chinese peers t(53) = 2.73, p = .009. Boys also scored marginally higher on externalizing problems as compared to girls t(53) = −1.97, p = .054. Next, bivariate correlations were run for each cultural group. Table 2 presents the correlations for all study variables as a function of cultural group. As expected, externalizing problems were significantly and positively associated with internalizing problems for both groups. Emotion knowledge was negatively associated with internalizing problems among European American children. In contrast, emotion knowledge and internalizing problems were positively associated (r = .31) in the immigrant Chinese sample, although the correlation did not reach significance.

Table 1.

Descriptive Data of Mother and Child Variables by Culture.

	Immigrant Chinese			European American
	M	SD	Range	M	SD	Range
Maternal Education	2.90	.29	1	2.48	.62	2
Functional Communication	51.95	9.38	33	53.91	5.85	26
Externalizing Problems*	138.77	16.81	57	153.85	21.98	90
Internalizing Problems	148.91	23.07	98	145.97	16.87	64
Emotion Knowledge	6.91	2.52	10	7.61	1.68	9

Note. *p < .05.

Table 2.

Correlations Across Variables by Culture.

	1	2	3	4	5	6
Gender	–	−.12	.19	−.31⁺	.15	.13
Maternal Education	.03	–	.19	−.17	.06	.07
Functional Communication	.02	−.24	–	−.53**	−.22	.28
Externalizing Problems	−.45*	−.05	−.11	–	.34⁺	−.09
Internalizing Problems	.12	.07	−.26	.51*	–	−.51**
Emotion Knowledge	−.22	−.08	−.05	.09	.31	–

Note. European American correlations are above the diagonal, and Immigrant Chinese are below, ⁺p < .1, *p < .05, **p < .01, (all significance tests are two-tailed).

Relations of Children’s Emotion Knowledge to Internalizing Problems

Our first model (Model 1) was designed to determine the relations between children’s emotion knowledge scores and their internalizing problems, independent of demographic variables including maternal education, culture and gender, as well as children’s verbal ability and externalizing problems. Our second model (Model 2) tested for the interaction effect of culture and emotion knowledge. Results of our regression analyses are summarized in Table 3.

Table 3.

Model Results Predicting Children’s Internalizing Problems.

	B	SE	®	R² or R² change
Model 1				.26*
Culture	6.22	5.70	.16
Gender*	11.78	5.16	.31
Maternal Education	3.51	4.77	.10
Func Comm	−.32	.35	−.12
Externalizing**	.46	.14	.50
EK	−.12	1.19	−.01
Model 2				.44***
Culture	6.04	5.05	.15
Gender**	14.32	4.61	.38
Maternal Ed.	4.32	4.22	.12
Func Comm	−.16	.31	−.06
Externalizing***	.47	.12	.51
EK**	−5.10	1.68	−.54
Culture x EK***	8.80	2.19	.68

Note. EK = Emotion knowledge, European American and female were set as the reference group, *p < .05; **p < .01, ***p < .001.

The overall effects of Model 1 was significant, F(6, 48) = 2.88, p = .02. Additionally, there were main effects of gender and externalizing problems, whereby boys exhibited greater externalizing problems than did girls, and children with more externalizing problems also had more internalizing problems. The main effect of emotion knowledge was not significant. Adding the interaction term to the model (Model 2) to test for the moderating effect of culture on the relation of emotion knowledge to internalizing problems increased the R² from .26 to .44, and this effect was highly significant (p = .001). The interaction term was also highly significant (p = .001), suggesting that culture did indeed moderate the relation of emotion knowledge to internalizing problems. An analogous set of analyses was conducted to examine the relation of emotion knowledge to externalizing problems. There was a main effect of gender, b = −.36, t(46) = −2.64, p = .01, and internalizing problems, b = .38, t(46) = −3.35, p = .01. However, adding the interaction term did not significantly increase the variance explained, nor did the interaction term reach significance, b = −.34, t(46) = −1.69, p > .05.

The significance of the emotion knowledge by culture interaction for our internalizing model suggests that the effect of emotion knowledge on internalizing problems differed as a function of culture. To test whether within each culture, the relation of emotion knowledge to children’s internalizing problems was significantly different from zero, we ran a simple slopes analysis using Hayes and Matthes’ (2009) MODPROBE macro approach, which allowed for modeling the relation between emotion knowledge and internalizing levels by each culture. The results showed that for European American children emotion knowledge was negatively associated with children’s internalizing problems, b = −.54, t(47) = −2.61, p = .013. In contrast, for immigrant Chinese children, emotion knowledge was positively associated with children’s internalizing problems, b = .37, t(47) = 2.26, p = .03. Figure 1 illustrates the relation of emotion knowledge to children’s internalizing problems as a function of culture.

Figure 1.

Prospective Associations Between Children’s Emotion Knowledge and Internalizing Problems by Culture.

To address concerns with missing data due to attrition we reran our analysis using Mplus (Muthén & Muthén, 2017), employing full information maximum likelihood (FIML). FIML uses all available data points in a database by maximizing the casewise likelihood of the observed data using parameters estimated by the available data of each individual (McArdle, 2009). In this model, our sample size was brought up to 120. FIML has been shown to generate a vector of means and a covariance matrix among the variables that is less biased and more efficient than other missing data procedure methods, such as listwise or pairwise deletion and mean substitution (Wothke, 2000). This model replicated our above-described findings, the interaction term was significant (b = 8.00, p < .001), suggesting that the effects of EK depends on culture.

Discussion

To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study to demonstrate that culture moderates the relation of children’s emotion knowledge to subsequent internalizing problems. This is also the first study that we know of to investigate the longitudinal relation of emotion knowledge in preschool to internalizing problems in early school years when internalizing problems show a steep increase in onset (Collins et al., 2002; Yap & Jorm, 2015). Our findings demonstrate that after controlling for maternal education, gender, verbal ability, and children’s externalizing problems, children with higher levels of emotional understanding had lower levels of internalizing problems three-and-a-half years later. However, this relation only held true for European American children. For immigrant Chinese children, the relation was weaker, but in the opposite direction, whereby advanced emotion knowledge at the preschool age was associated with increased internalizing problems when children started formal schooling. Emotion knowledge thus appears to serve different psychological functions for European American and immigrant Chinese children.

Our results with European American children are consistent with past research showing that among Western children, higher levels of emotion knowledge lead to decreased internalizing problems (Fine et al., 2003; Heinze et al., 2015; Schultz et al., 2001). In European American culture, emotional experiences are considered to be closely related to one’s self and well-being (Suh et al., 1998). Individuals’ personal feelings and other mental states are viewed as indicative of both social relations (Potter, 1998) and the “true self” (Andersen, 1984). In line with this cultural emphasis on emotion, European American parents are often eager to play the role of “emotion coaches” in the effort to raise “emotionally intelligent” children (Gottman, 1998). They often acknowledge, accept, nurture, and validate children’s emotional expressions, preferences and wishes (Doan & Wang, 2010; Wang, 2001; Wang & Fivush, 2005). In this cultural context, children who have developed higher levels of emotion knowledge may be better at appraising social situations and negotiating interactions with others, thus may be better at having their emotional needs met. Thus, consistent with goodness-of-fit models (Caldwell-Harris & Ayçiçegi, 2006; Kristof, 1996), emotion knowledge was found to be beneficial for European American children.

In contrast, in East Asian cultures that put a premium on social harmony and group interests, emotion is often viewed as destructive or even dangerous to ongoing relationships. The emphasis is placed on cultural norms and the social roles of individuals that serve to control individual behaviors and govern social relations (Halberstadt et al., 2001; Triandis, 1989; Wang, 2006). Accordingly, Asian parents are not preoccupied with helping children to express or understand emotions, but rather emphasizing psychological discipline and behavioral standards (Miller et al., 1997; Suh et al., 1998; Wang, 2006). In this cultural context, advanced emotion knowledge that directs children’s attention to inner subjective experiences may be counterproductive in regulating social relations and further make children susceptible to socialization practices of criticism and social shaming prevalent in Asian families (Cutting & Dunn, 2002). For immigrant children, those with higher levels of emotion knowledge may particularly feel a lack of synchrony between their understanding of emotions and their heritage culture (Doan & Wang, 2010; Wang, 2006). Thus, consistent with goodness-of-fit models (Caldwell-Harris & Ayçiçegi, 2006; Kristof, 1996), emotion knowledge was found to be unbeneficial and even harmful for immigrant Chinese children.

Notably, prior studies examining the prevalence of internalizing problems in adolescents across cultures have shown that immigrant Chinese adolescents tend to have higher levels of internalizing behaviors such as depression and anxiety than do European American and Mainland Chinese adolescents (Chang, 1996; Rhee et al., 2003; Zhou et al., 2003). However, this pattern of differences is not always confirmed. For example, in a study with a sample of five- to 17-year-old immigrant Chinese children, researchers found that the immigrant children had lower levels of behavioral, including internalizing, problems when compared with American norms (Chang, Morrissey, & Koplewicz, 1995). In the current study, we found no cultural difference in the level of internalizing problems among our seven-year-olds. We speculate that cultural differences may emerge later in development, especially when rates of internalizing problems increase in adolescence (Bongers, Koot, van der Ende, & Verhulst, 2003). The extant suite of research suggests that it is critical to take into account the specific developmental period, in connection with the unique social-cognitive characteristics of that period, when studying well-being outcomes in children. It further highlights the importance of cross-cultural, longitudinal studies to understand how behavioral problems may develop and change over time, as a function of children’s cultural background.

It is important to note that emotion knowledge is a broad construct and that most emotion knowledge measures tap into children’s understanding of physical cues (e.g., facial expressions, body posture) or situational antecedents of emotions in story characters (Denham et al., 2003; Fine et al., 2003; Heinze et al., 2015; Schultz et al, 2001). Asking about emotions of story characters rather than children themselves helps to eliminate social desirability biases. A few studies that examined children’s understanding of emotion situations that involved either themselves or generally others yielded identical findings (Wang, 2009; Wang et al., 2006).

In the current study, the children were three-and-a-half years of age when emotion knowledge was assessed. To make the task easier for children, we matched the story protagonist with the age, gender and ethnicity of the child. This method is based on past research showing that high familiarity and similarity facilitates young children’s performance in emotion judgment tasks (Shantz, 1975). The measure focuses on children’s explicit knowledge of emotion-eliciting situations, in line with prior research and our theoretical perspective. Given the multifaceted nature of emotion knowledge, it is critically important in future studies to examine other aspects of emotion knowledge in shaping children’s psychological functioning. For example, studies may assess children’s appropriate or inappropriate responses to others’ emotions, or the extent to which children understand that different people may have different emotional reactions to the same situation. In particular, East Asian children, given their cultural emphasis on attending to others’ roles and behaviors, may benefit from behavioral aspects of emotion knowledge in social situations (Chen, Liu, Ellis, Zarbatany, 2016; Wang, 2013).

Several limitations to the current research must be acknowledged. First, although our prospective design provided some assurance for direction of causality, we did not measure children’s behavioral problems at Time 1, thus we were unable to assess changes in children’s behavioral problems as a function of emotional understanding. Future studies examining longitudinal trajectories of children’s behavioral problems across multiple contexts will provide additional support for causation. Further longitudinal studies can also shed light on possible changes in the relation of emotion knowledge to psychological adjustment during the course of development. For example, as immigrant children become more acculturated to American culture, would the pattern of results change so that the children might benefit from emotion knowledge that contributes to emotion regulation and serves as a protective factor later in life? Or, given the contrasting values and practices they are exposed to, would emotion knowledge continue to have negative effects on immigrant children’s subjective well-being through adolescence (Zhou et al., 2003)? The second limitation concerns our small sample size, which makes it difficult to test three-way interactions among culture, emotion knowledge, and gender. Future studies are called for to corroborate the current findings. In addition, we recognize that there are important within-cultural, individual variations in values and practices concerning emotion. Thus, an important line of future research would be to assess whether emotion knowledge predicts well-being outcomes in relation to specific individual and familial characteristics. Finally, our sample was not from a clinical population and, therefore, it is unclear about the extent to which the findings can be generalized to more severe levels of anxiety and depression. On the other hand, given that both cultural (Tan, 2014) and individual factors (e.g., problems with emotion-related processes) underlie anxiety and mood disorders (Campbell-Sills & Barlow, 2007), it is critical to examine in cultural context emerging emotion-related abilities that may have important implications for later mental health.

Despite these limitations, findings from the current study make an important contribution to the literature on children’s emotion knowledge and well-being. Our data point out the importance of considering individual development within the larger cultural context, rather than in isolation. As intervention programs designed to improve emotion knowledge in children are implemented, it is critical for both researchers and clinicians alike to be sensitive to issues of cultural diversity and to consider the importance of fit between individual social-cognitive skills and cultural expectations. Unlike the common assumption in Western psychology, emotional intelligence manifests differently in East Asian cultures where individual feelings are given less weight while behavioral regulation and awareness of and sensitivity to social norms play more important roles in influencing the quality of social interactions and hence adjustment. Furthermore, it is important to recognize that immigrant children are bestriding two cultures and thus the best intervention approach may be one that fosters multiple emotional intelligences in the context of bi-cultural competencies, which may help children successfully navigate across different social settings and situations.

Footnotes

Acknowledgments

We thank members of the Social Cognition Development Lab at Cornell University for their contributions to the project. Special thanks go to the children and families who made this study possible.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The authors(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This research was supported by Grant R01-MH64661 from the National Institute of Mental Health to QW.

Stacey N. Doan, PhD is the Director of the Mind and Health lab and an Associate Professor of health psychology in the Department of Psychology at Claremont McKenna College. Dr. Doan is interested in the role of emotions and their impact on health and health behaviours among diverse ethnic populations. Her work has been funded by the National Institutes of Health. Her published works focus on emotions and chronic physiological stress, the influence of parenting and social-cultural practices on children’s emotion regulation and stress physiology. She is the recipient of several early career awards including from the American Psychological Association and the Society for Research on Child Development.

Qi Wang, PhD is a Professor in Human Development at Cornell University. She holds a BSc in Psychology from Peking University, China, and a PhD in Psychology from Harvard University. Her work has been funded by the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health. She has received many honors and awards, including the Young Scientist Award from the International Society for Study of Behavioral Development (2006), the Award for Distinguished Contributions to Early Research from the Society for Research in Child Development (2005), and the Outstanding Contribution to Research Award from SRCD Asian Caucus (2013). Her research has been frequently published in top psychology journals. Her book The autobiographical self in time and culture (2013) was published by Oxford University Press ().

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