Maternal Meta-Emotion Philosophy: A Qualitative Study on Beijing Chinese, Hong Kong Chinese, and European American Mothers with Preschool-aged Children

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. We analyzed thirty mothers’ responses to a meta-emotion interview (ten from each cultural groups) thematically and identified a new dimension of Training Philosophy (focusing on personal growth or social/moral standards), a theme of Other/Self-focused Concerns About Negative Emotions, and subthemes related to emotion dismissing philosophy: Conditionally Dismissing towards Children’s Negative Emotions and Different Distress Responses to Children’s Negative Emotion. Differences in salience of these themes across cultures were discussed in the context of 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.