A case study of children's emotion display rules in Chinese socio-cultural contexts

• Main Author: 張建博
• Other Authors: 金瑞芝
• Format: Others
• Language: zh-TW
• Published: 2009
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/44618804443206078839

碩士 === 臺北市立教育大學 === 兒童發展碩士學位學程 === 97 === The purpose of this research was to investigate the emotion display rules that children learned from the interactions with the significant others in the daily family life, and the contextual factors that affected children’s emotion expression in Chinese socio-cultural contexts? The participants were a four-year-old girl, her younger brother aged three, her female cousin aged four, and other family members including parents, grandparents, the aunt, and the researcher as her uncle. The data were collected through observation, interviews, the mother’s memos and the researcher’s field notes. The findings of this research were as the following: 1.The Chinese culture emphasizes the values of being concordant and polite to others. Therefore, when Ling Ling interacted with the adults , she was taught to suppress and weaken her emotions, not only the negative emotions, such as “Don't cry, say it.”, “You should not cry to make adults angry in the morning.”, “That's all right. Don't cry.”, “If you are angry, you should say it.”, but also the positive ones, such as “Don't laugh! Can't you see I am angry?”, “You can't laugh others.” and “Be quiet! Don't laugh so loudly! ” 2.Different from the adults, the display rules that children exhibited in peer interactions included enhancing both negative and positive emotions, such as “You wanna cry! You Cry!” and “You should pretend cry!” The former meant that crying is an indicator of weakness, which demonstrated the understanding that the negative emotion may lead to negative results. The latter meant that crying is pitiful, which demonstrated the understanding that the negative emotion may lead to positive results. The results showed that Ling Ling had already known how to express negative emotion and the possible consequences that resulted about crying in different contexts. 3.The research also found the contextual factors that affected Ling Ling's emotion expression; for example, whether adults were absent or not, who was watching, the value of maintaining family harmony, and the attachment relationship. Finally, according to the results of the study, the researcher proposed some relevant suggestions to the parents and the future study. Key words: Chinese culture, emotion display rules, young children