Cultural Patterns and Individual Differences in the Child’s Emotional Meaning System

Abstract

To observe the variety of ways in which children around the world learn to be human is to observe, among other things, the socialization of emotion. This variety, however, has not been explored by those interested in affect. Virtually all of the existing studies of emotional development have been conducted in American settings. Although these studies of the development of emotional repertoires in American children have found fascinating and important types of subcultural variation (e.g., Miller, 1982), the range of variation is nonetheless quite narrow when compared with that found outside our own society. An anthropological shibboleth has it that the world’s cultures present a “natural laboratory” in which the parameters of child development have been varied and the human psychosocial possibilities have been explored. This is no less the case in the area of emotional development than it is in the area of what is called social development. In this chapter, I would like to demonstrate not only that emotional development is a central aspect of social development, but that it is also importantly involved in the development in the child of a culturally specific world view.