A Comparative Analysis of Emotion-Related Cultural Norms in Popular American and Chinese Storybooks

Abstract

Storybooks written for young children contain rich information on emotions and act as important educational tools for children’s emotion socialization. The current study aims to investigate how cultural norms regarding emotions are portrayed in the narratives of popular storybooks across cultures. Thus, in this study, 38 bestselling Chinese storybooks written by Chinese authors and 42 bestselling American storybooks by European-American writers were compared. The narratives were coded with a focus on emotion-related content and further analysed using binary logistic regressions. The findings revealed that American storybooks were more likely to present positive (vs. negative) emotions, negative powerful (vs. negative powerless) emotions, and supportive (vs. unsupportive and teaching) responses to negative emotions than Chinese storybooks, but less likely to present social (vs. personal) themes, other-based (vs. self-based) attribution, and teaching (vs. supportive and unsupportive) responses to negative emotions. However, the results found no cultural variation in the prevalence of intrinsic (vs. extrinsic) interpersonal emotion regulation. The findings suggest that elements of emotion-related content coexist in both cultures although the relative salience of such content differs across cultures.