Child and Family Emotional Functioning: A Cross-National Examination of Families from China and the United States

Scant research has examined links between particular emotion socialization processes and child emotion functioning cross-nationally. In this study, we assessed a sample of 55 families from the United States (U.S.; 28 boys and 27 girls) and 49 families from China (27 boys and 22 girls) on family emotional expressiveness and children’s emotional experiences and regulation. Results indicated that children and families from the U.S. reported greater emotional expressiveness than their Chinese counterparts. Children from the U.S. also reported greater undercontrolled emotion than Chinese youth. Family expression of positive emotion was related to effortful emotion regulation in U.S. youth only, whereas family expression of negative emotion was associated with undercontrolled emotion for both U.S. and Chinese children. Our findings advance context-specific models of emotional development by illustrating similarities and differences in emotional functioning among U.S. and Chinese families. From a clinical perspective, the findings suggest that practitioners should consider the cultural variations of emotion communication within families when conducting both assessment and therapy.     

Young Asian children with learning and behaviour problems: A family therapy approach

The paper describes work with five Asian families. The children were failing and showing signs of behavioural disturbance at infant or junior school, and it was felt that this could be due to family psychopathology. Communication with the adults presented some difficulty to the therapist, and there was the additional problem of distinguishing between those patterns of behaviour which were pathological and those which were merely unfamiliar. The approach used was pragmatic and based on the assumption that there is sufficient 'psychic unity' between people of different cultural backgrounds to be used therapeutically, even when communication is difficult.