Maternal Meta-Emotion Philosophy Across Cultures: How Beijing Chinese, Hong Kong Chinese, and European American Mothers Make Sense of Dismissing Children's Negative Emotions

Mother’s beliefs about negative emotions (i.e., meta-emotion philosophy) are deeply influential to how they socialize emotions in their children and can differ across cultures. However, framework of meta-emotion philosophy, such as emotion coaching and dismissing, was developed based on minority world population, including European Americans. The current study took an emic approach to explore the meta-emotion philosophy of three cultural groups, including two groups of Chinese mothers (living in Hong Kong and Beijing) and European American mothers in Midwest United States to expand our knowledge in emotion socialization to diverse cultural groups. Specifically, we investigated how mothers in these cultures made sense of their dismissing philosophy. We analyzed thirty mothers’ responses to a meta-emotion interview (ten from each cultural groups) thematically and identified four themes, including “For their own good”: Training philosophy, avoiding perceived social judgement, trapped in a vicious circle, and effective in ending an inconvenience. Implication of these themes across cultures were discussed in the context of the MEP framework as well the independence and interdependence cultural models. Overall, the present qualitative study highlighted the importance of investigating the applicability of frameworks based on European Americans on other cultural groups.