Feyza Corapci

Emotion displays in media: a comparison between American, Romanian, and Turkish children's storybooks

Childrens books may provide an important resource of culturally appropriate emotions. This study investigates emotion displays in childrens storybooks for preschoolers from Romania, Turkey, and the US in order to analyze cultural norms of emotions. We derived some hypotheses by referring to cross-cultural studies about emotion and emotion socialization. For such media analyses, the frequency rate of certain emotion displays can be seen as an indicator for the salience of the specific emotion. We expected that all childrens storybooks would highlight dominantly positive emotions and that US childrens storybooks would display negative powerful emotions (e.g., anger) more often and negative powerless emotions (e.g., sadness) less often than Turkish and Romanian storybooks. We also predicted that the positive and negative powerful emotion expressions would be more intense in the US storybooks compared to the other storybooks. Finally, we expected that social context (ingroup/outgroup) may affect the intensity emotion displays more in Turkish and Romanian storybooks compared to US storybooks. Illustrations in 30 popular childrens storybooks (10 for each cultural group) were coded. Results mostly confirmed the hypotheses but also pointed to differences between Romanian and Turkish storybooks. Overall, the study supports the conclusion that culture-specific emotion norms are reflected in media to which young children are exposed.

Does Mothers’ Self-Construal Contribute to Parenting Beyond Socioeconomic Status and Maternal Efficacy? An Exploratory Study of Turkish Mothers

This study examined the relative contribution of mothers’ self-construal to parenting above and beyond family socioeconomic status (SES) and maternal efficacy beliefs about parenting. A total of 58 Turkish mothers and their preschool-aged children participated in dyadic tasks in the laboratory setting. For the measurement of parenting, direct behavioral observations of mother–child interactions in three interaction contexts were utilized, and mother ratings of emotion socialization were obtained. Mothers also reported on their parenting efficacy, self-construal, child temperament, and family demographics. Results revealed a more balanced endorsement of autonomous and relational self-characteristics as well as more sensitive parenting among higher SES mothers. Furthermore, mothers’ self-construal contributed unique variance to the prediction of sensitive parenting over and above SES, maternal efficacy and child temperament. Yet, in the prediction of negatively controlling parenting, mothers’ self-construal did not account for unique variance. Lower parenting efficacy and lower SES were the only predictors of punishing, overriding, and distress magnifying responses. Finally, results indicated a marginally significant indirect effect from SES to sensitive parenting via autonomous-related self-construal, controlling for the indirect effect of maternal efficacy.