Heidi Fung

Across Time and Beyond Skin: Self and Transgression in the Everyday Socialization of Shame among Taiwanese Preschool Children

This study examines the construction of the culture-specific self through a form of seemingly harmful socializing practices among young Taiwanese children. Spontaneous daily family interactions have been systematically and longitudinally videotaped in seven families and events of shame are found to occur regularly at all datapoints. One third of these events occur in chains, involving multiple episodes about the child’s transgressions committed at different times, mostly in the here-and-now, followed by reenactments of the past and expectations for a better self in the future. While in nearly half of the episodes, some authority is explicitly invoked to judge the child’s behaviors, family members are always co-present with the child and ready to share his/her transgression and shame. Findings of analyses on spatiotemporal and relational markers in these situated events suggest a dynamic and fluid view of the self and a holistic treatment of multi-leveled contexts.

Affect and Early Moral Socialization: Some Insights and Contributions from Indigenous Psychological Studies in Taiwan

What distinguishes the human being from the animal is shame. When a person does not know shame, his/her conscience would vanish. For such a person, parents would have no way to discipline; teachers and friends would have no way to advise. Without the will to strive upward, how could one improve? To be an official without shame is treacherous; how could he be loyal? To be a son without shame is disobedient; how could he be filial? To be a neighbor without shame is wicked; how could he be kind?... As one knows shame, the sense of right and wrong would be realized, and his dying conscience would have a chance to revive. ~ The Pedigree (and Familial Instructions) of the Zhou Clan

How European American and Taiwanese Mothers Talk to Their Children About Learning

Little cross-cultural research exists on parental socialization of childrens learning beliefs. The current study compared 218 conversations between European American and Taiwanese mothers and children (6-10 years) about good and poor learning. The findings support well-documented cultural differences in learning beliefs. European Americans mentioned mental activities and positive affect more, whereas Taiwanese mentioned learning virtues and negative affect more. Mothers, especially European American, reciprocated their childrens talk about mental activities, learning virtues, and negative affect. Children, especially Taiwanese, reciprocated their mothers talk about positive affect. Mothers invoked more mental activities and positive affect when discussing good learning, but more learning virtues and negative affect when discussing poor learning. These findings reveal a source of cultural differences in beliefs and potential enculturation.

When Culture Meets Psyche: Understanding the Contextualized Self through the Life and Dreams of an Elderly Taiwanese Woman

Through examining the possible meaning of the private, subjective, and idiosyncratic experiences of an individual-a sequence of dreams that an elderly Taiwanese lady has had, this study asks where culture is and how we should place the self in relation to culture. A-ma, the grandmother of one focal child in my previous works on socialization practices with young children at home, unexpectedly shared her life and particularly her dreams about her two deceased husbands with me after having known me for two years. Her first husband, with whom she only had a six-year marital life, appeared to her in a dream 13 years after his death when she had just remarried and moved the family for the sake of their childrens schooling. He later revisited her on the very first night whenever and wherever she just moved to a new place, even 45 years after his death. This simple yet compelling dream seemed to have a profound consequence-she refused to have a sexual relationship with her second husband in their 24-year martial life. During my follow-up interviews with her in the past decade, the deeper 1 entered her inner world, the more 1 appreciate the inseparability of the self and culture. While the individuals meaning making process inevitably involves intensive dialogues between the self and the powerful cultural models instantiated in concrete life experiences, theories of culture must also account for human agency that actively and selectively make use of cultural resources as well as constraints. Such a dynamic nature is at once subjective and objective, personal and collective.

Multi-faceted discipline strategies of Chinese parenting:

Parental disciplining of their misbehaving children continues to draw much research attention. Baumrind’s typology of parenting styles has been frequently used to classify Chinese parenting as more authoritarian. Although influential, research tends predominantly to focus on abstract characterization. Yet, parenting is a practice informed by specific cultural ethnotheories and enacted in response to their children’s behavior in specific contexts. Our study attempted to explore this type of disciplining in situ. We interviewed 89 mothers from Taiwan (45) and Hong Kong (44) with children from near the end of infancy to beginning-school age. Mothers were asked to share their disciplinary strategies for handling four hypothetical yet common situations in which children misbehaved. These situations varied in setting, social distance among participants, possible consequences, nature of rules involved, and degree of conflict. We found five strategy types. Moreover, mothers prioritized them differently for different situations. Finally, we identified four ways of using strategies: single, contingent, simultaneous, or ratcheting-up. Depending on their strategies in a given situation, these uses also varied. We were compelled to conclude that Chinese parenting is more multi-faceted than has been typically portrayed in research. Implications for future research on parenting across cultures are discussed.