We investigated the role of mothers' references to mental states and behaviors and children's emotion situation knowledge (ESK) in a prospective, cross-cultural context. European American mothers (n = 71) and Chinese immigrant mothers (n = 60) and their children participated in the study. Maternal references to mental states and behaviors were…

Adolescents' intergenerational narratives--the stories they tell about their mothers' and fathers' early experiences--are an important component of their identities (Fivush & Merrill, 2016; Merrill & Fivush, 2016). This study explored adolescents' intergenerational narratives across cultures. Adolescents aged 12 to 21 from 3 cultural…

Recent work has shown that preschool-aged children and adults understand freedom of choice regardless of culture, but that adults across cultures differ in perceiving social obligations as constraints on action. To investigate the development of these cultural differences and universalities, we interviewed school-aged children (4-11) in Nepal and…

This study examined the relation of mother-child discussions of internal states during reminiscing to the development of trait and evaluative self-representations in 131 European American and Chinese immigrant 3-year olds. Mothers and children discussed one positive and one negative event, and children were interviewed for self-descriptions.…

This study examined in a cross-cultural context mothers' discussions of mental states and external behaviors in a story-telling task with their 3-year-old children and the relations of such discussions to children's emotion situation knowledge (ESK). The participants were 71 European American and 60 Chinese immigrant mother-child pairs in the…

Cross-cultural studies have shown that Asians exhibit less accessibility to episodic memories than Euro-Americans. This difference is often attributed to differential cognitive and social influences on memory retention, although there have been no empirical data concerning the underlying mechanism. Three studies were conducted to examine encoding…

Knowledge of emotion situations facilitates the interpretation, processing, and organization of significant personal event information and thus may be an important contributor to the development of autobiographical memory. This longitudinal study tested the hypothesis in a cross-cultural context. The participants were native Chinese children,…

Recollection of early childhood experiences was investigated in 225 European Canadian and 133 Chinese children (ages 8, 11, and 14) by a memory fluency task that measured accessibility of multiple early memories and elicited the earliest memory. Younger children provided memories of events that occurred at earlier ages than older children.…

Korean, Chinese, and American children were given identical free-narrative interviews about life events and were shown a narrated story. Children were then interviewed about the story. Compared to others, Americans provided more references to specific past events, more descriptives, more references to internal states, and more mentions of…

Examined social, emotional, and cognitive characteristics of American and Chinese 6-year-olds' narratives. Found that, compared to American children, Chinese children showed greater orientation toward social engagement, greater concern with moral correctness, greater concern with authority, a less autonomous orientation, more expressions of…