How emotional experiences during child rearing become behavior and how this is culturally contextualized
Definitions
Child rearing is defined as a diverse set of interactions between children and their caregivers including parents, educators, or other community members depending on the cultural context.
Socializing emotions are emotions that are functionally used in child rearing to produce behavioral adherence to a social norm or practice (Funk et al., 2012).
“Ethnotheories” is a term to describe “the normative beliefs specific to a culture… regarding the nature and value of emotions [that] supply a way of understanding one’s emotional experiences” (Sheikh, 2014, pg. 390).
Four Stages of Emotional Socialization
Funk et al. describes the process through which caretakers use emotionally arousing response methods to help children understand whether a behavior is good or bad.
Behavioral expectations, emotion choices, and techniques are defined by the context's ethotheory.
Stage 1: Predispositional Priming
Occurs during the pre-lingusitc development stage, or when children cannot understand or produce language.
This stage prepares the child for lessons learned later in life.
Caregivers distinguish between bad and good behavior and reinforce the expectation through positive and negative emotions such as shame or pride.
Stage 2: Experiential Constancy
Important for creating the desired emotional-behavioral neural pathway.
When not confounded by contradictory experiences, constancy maximizes the child’s life experiences around learning important lessons.
Stage 3: Emotional Arousal
Experiences must be defined by emotional arousal through disciplining techniques that are either positive or negative.
Positive emotional arousal can be the result of techniques that impart emotions such as pride or cherishing.
Negative emotional arousal is the consequence of techniques that result in emotions such as shame or fear.
Stage 4: Evaluation
The process by which parental expression of approval or disapproval places the behavior of the child into a normative framework of values.
Normative framework is defined by ethnotheory.
Self-Regulation Theory: ‘Emotional Arousal’ and Behavior
Main idea: positive emotions elicit activation motivation and negative emotions lead to avoidance or inhibition (Sheikh, 2014).
Emotional arousal, positive or negative, is defined as the creation of pathways that either inhibit or activate certain behaviors.
Behavioral inhibition can be better understood by the concept of active avoidance. Since the emotion is negative, an individual will avoid the behavior and inhibit their own actions.
Since shame is a negative affective experience, it is understood that shame is initially based on behavioral inhibition (Sheikh, 2014, pg. 387).
However, Sheikh (2014) argues that studies have found shame in the behavioral activation system. This means that shame can theoretically be used to positively affect behavior rather than to only punish or inhibit behavior.
How can shame activate behavior?
Culture defines where shame falls in the activation and inhibition dichotomy.
Sheikh (2014) points to culture as the definitive mark of how emotions such as shame “provide culturally specific information on the effectiveness of particular strategies during an emotional event, including when to alter behavior to incorporate activation-based responses and which specific types of behaviors to incorporate” (Sheikh, 2014, pg. 389).
Culture and Emotions
1. Emotion Modeling
Child-caregiver interactions model culturally appropriate emotional responses to different stimuli and serve as regulatory transactions models of distinct emotional qualities (Funk et al, 2012).
2. Ethnotheory defined norms
Cultural context (ethnotheory) determines what values and norms the caregiver emphasizes during the child rearing process, but also informs culturally acceptable child-caregiver interactions. In other words, child rearing practices are culturally defined in both their form and function (Funk et al., 2012).
3. Shame and ethnotheories
Some ethnotheories promote the use of shame and establish frequency, leading to certain types of shame becoming more manageable and producing desirable outcomes such as self-improvement (Sheikh, 2014).
Scope of Study: The Two Broad Ethnotheories
Individualist
Critical of shame in child rearing
Focus is only on the individual without an "other"
Personal shame -- the transgressor's shame is not shared with an "other"
Collectivist
View shame as a tool to activate behavior.
Focus is on the collective community as the "other"
Shame-sharing methods -- a shamed "other" (someone significant to the transgressor) is present and implicated in the shaming