Emotion Across Cultures – Comparative Analysis of Emotion-Related Contents in Children's Storybooks

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2024-09-01

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Üzüm, Sabiha
Demircan, Hasibe Özlen

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AbstractThe present study aims to discover the role of cultural context in predicting emotion-related contents found in children's storybooks written in Türkiye and written in Western countries and translated into Turkish. The study was conducted as a cross-sectional predictive study by collecting data from 21 children's storybooks. In the narratives of the storybooks, the focal themes of emotional incidents as social & personal and attribution of emotions to others and to self were coded deductively as categorical variables. Log-linear analysis was preferred to analyze the data, depending on the categorical nature of all the study variables. The preliminary results indicated that cultural context could be a predictor of both focal themes of emotional incidents and attribution of emotions. In other words, in the preliminary analysis, cultural context significantly predicted emotion-related content in children's storybooks. In this context, it was revealed that Turkish storybooks are more inclined towards depicting collectivist emotion-related content rather than individualist ones, in comparison to Western storybooks.Extended Summary:Introduction:For emotional development, there are processes both dependent and independent of the social contexts (Sroufe, 1996), which brings the distinction of individuality and collectivity phenomena evaluated through independency, which is aligned with internal attributes, and interdependency, which associates adaptation to the social context (Markus & Kitayama, 1991). Therefore, comprehending how individuals socialize their emotions necessitates considering the cultural contexts in which they were raised and currently inhabit (Trommsdorff & Heikamp, 2013) since adopting norms, values, and roles throughout the social and emotional domains is critical to emotional development (Grusec & Hastings, 2007).At this point, the influential role of emotion socialization agents such as children's storybooks due to offering emotion-related vocabulary for children, serving as examples for recognizing emotions (Garner, 2010), contributing to their understanding of daily emotional interactions (Anderson & Hamilton, 2005). Therein, the cultural context in children's storybooks may cause differences in terms of emotional content (Morling & Lamoreaux, 2008) because the expression of emotions and the different preferences of individuals to express their emotional experiences in social environments are reflected in their cultural contexts (Ding et al., 2021).In this context, the present study aims to discover the role of children's storybooks in children's emotional socialization by analyzing emotion-related contents found in the storybooks written in Turkiye and written in Western countries and translated into Turkish, which differ from each other in terms of individualism and collectivism (Hofstede, 1991). Even though the elements within the emotion-related content were assumed to exist in both Western and Turkish cultures, it was hypothesized that Turkish storybooks are more likely than Western storybooks to present collectivist content rather than individualist emotion-related content.Method:The current study provides an emotion-related content evaluation and analysis of children's storybooks written in Türkiye and translated from Western countries. In that, it was planned to analyze children's storybook narratives concerning the following domains:focal theme of emotional incidentsas social theme & personal theme, attribution of emotionsas to others and to self (Ding et al., 2021). Thus, the data collected from children's storybooks' narrations was used to predict a possible difference between cultural contexts. For this reason, the current study was designed as a cross-sectional predictive study (Johnson, 2001) to examine the following research question:RQ. How well does the cultural context in children's storybooks predict emotion-related contents (emotional words, focal theme of emotional incident, and attribution of emotion) in these storybooks?The data was collected using a criterion-sampling approach by identifying the storybooks that meet the predetermined criteria (Patton, 2015) determined by following the guidelines of previous research (e.g., Ata-Aktürk & Demircan, 2021; Ding et al.,2021):·Listed in bestseller lists of the most popular online shopping platforms in Türkiye·Targeted children between the ages of zero to eight·Being a narrative storybookThe emotion-related content coding criteria were used in line with the study of Ding et al. (2021) to identify and code the emotion-related contents in the narration of selected children's storybooks. The narrations of the storybooks were coded deductively. The frequency of the emotion-related content concerning the codebook was determined in the coding process. Then, the data was analyzed using log-linear analysis with two discrete predictor variables with two levels in each and one discrete outcome variable with two levels.Preliminary Results:The preliminary analysis was conducted with 21 storybooks with no more than 20% of expected cell frequency < 5. The results indicated that the three-way interaction between cultural context, focal theme of emotional incidents, and attribution of emotions makes a significant contribution to the model. Also, it was found that there is a significant interaction between focal theme of emotional incidents and attribution of emotions. Thus, the results indicate that cultural context predicts both focal theme and attribution simultaneously according to the log-linear model.Discussion:The preliminary results of the research have shown that, as expected, the cultural context played a predictor role in the presence of personal or social focal themes of emotional incidents and in the attribution of emotions. Therein, as it was hypothesized Turkish storybooks are more likely than Western storybooks to present collectivist emotion-related content rather than individualist emotion-related content. However, the lack of two-way interaction between cultural context and the attribution of emotions could be caused by children's storybooks being written from a third-person perspective due to the characteristics of the target age group as the audience. Additionally, concerning the focal themes of emotional incidents, due to the characteristics of the target age group, there might be a tendency in literary narratives to concretize emotions in a social theme rather than presenting the emotions in a personal theme, which could be a more abstract them for the target age group. Nevertheless, despite all these, the predictor role of cultural context on emotion-related content in children's storybooks was observed.References:Ata-Aktürk, A., Demircan, H. Ö. (2021). An analysis of picture books for children aged 3 to 6 years: portrayals of engineers and the engineering design process.IJEC53, 261–278.Ding, R., He, W., & Wang, Q. (2021). A comparative analysis of emotion-related cultural norms in popular American and Chinese storybooks.Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology,52(2), 209-226.Garner, P. W. (2010). Emotional competence and its influences on teaching and learning.Educational Psychology Review 22(3), 297–321.Grusec, J. E., & Hastings, P. D. (2007).Handbook of socialization: Theory and research. Guilford Press.Hofstede, G. (1991).Cultures and organizations: Software of the mind: Intercultural cooperation and its importance for survival.McGraw-Hill Publishing Co.Johnson, B. (2001). Toward a new classification of nonexperimental quantitative research.Educational Researcher,30(2), 3-13.Markus, H. R., & Kitayama, S. (1991). Culture and the self: Implications for cognition, emotion, and motivation. Psychological Review, 98(2), 224–253.Morling, B., & Lamoreaux, M. (2008). Measuring culture outside the head: A meta-analysis of individualism—collectivism in cultural products.Personality and Social Psychology Review, 12(3), 199-221.Patton, M. Q. (2015).Qualitative research & evaluation methods(4th ed.). SAGE. Sroufe, L. (1996).Emotional development: The organization of emotional life in the early years.Cambridge University Press.

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https://hdl.handle.net/11511/109653

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Department of Elementary and Early Childhood Education, Conference / Seminar