Cultural Orientation, Parental Emotion Socialization, and Adolescents’ Socio-Emotional Functioning Across Three Asian Cultures: India, China, and Singapore

Limited research has examined parental emotion socialization across Asian cultural contexts. Guided by the theoretical frameworks of family change and self-construal, this study examined cultural orientation toward independence-interdependence, parental emotion socialization processes, and their relations with adolescents’ psychological adjustment across three Asian cultural contexts—rural families in South India, suburban families in China, and families in Singapore. Participants included 300 Indian adolescents ( Mage = 15.58 years; 57.3% male) and their parents, 310 Chinese adolescents ( Mage = 13.04 years; 46.3% female) and their parents, and 241 Singaporean adolescents ( Mage = 14.44 years; 48.3% female) and their parents. Both adolescents and parents completed self-report measures of cultural orientation and emotion socialization, and adolescents completed a measure of their psychological adjustment. We first established construct validation for two emotion socialization processes and found that the factor structure for parental reactions varied across Asian contexts and parent versus adolescent reports, while the factor structure for parental emotion expressivity varied only across informants. Second, we tested whether the two parental emotion socialization processes mediated the association between cultural orientation toward independence-interdependence and adolescent behavior problems, and found differential relations across the three Asian contexts. Our data supported the model of family change and showed that across the Asian societies, the variations in independence-interdependence orientation provide different models of parental emotion socialization with nuances in meaning and function, as revealed by the construct validation of parental reactions and emotional expressivity and their implications for adolescents’ socio-emotional functioning.

A Conceptual Model of the Intergenerational Transmission of Emotion Dysregulation in Mothers with a History of Childhood Maltreatment

Objectives: Adults with a history of childhood maltreatment report problems with emotion regulation (ER) and parenting, which can contribute to maladaptive outcomes in offspring. The following narrative review consists of a theoretical and empirical synthesis of the literature examining child maltreatment, emotion regulation, and parenting, with an emphasis on parental emotion socialization. Method: Building upon the literature contained in the review, we developed a novel conceptual model that elucidates some of the mechanisms involved in the intergenerational transmission of emotion dysregulation among mothers with a history of childhood maltreatment. Taking into account risk and protective factors (e.g., socio-economic status, polyvictimization, teenage motherhood, access to social supports), our conceptual model highlights both direct (e.g., social learning) and indirect (e.g., ER difficulties) mechanisms through which child maltreatment contributes to problems with parental emotion socialization and ER difficulties in the next generation. Implications: Directions for future research and implications for intervention will be discussed with an emphasis on preventing the continuity of maladaptive parenting by promoting the development of parents’ ER abilities in a trauma-informed, resilience-focused framework.