This study investigates emotional display rules for seven basic emotions. The main goal was to compare emotional display rules of Canadians, US Americans, and Japanese across as well as within cultures regarding the specific emotion, the type of interaction partner, and gender. A total of 835 university students participated in the study. The results indicate that Japanese display rules permit the expression of powerful (anger, contempt, and disgust) significantly less than those of the two North American samples. Japanese also think that they should express positive emotions (happiness, surprise) significantly less than the Canadian sample. Furthermore, Japanese varied the display rules for different interaction partners more than the two North American samples did only for powerful emotions. Gender differences were similar across all three cultural groups. Men expressed powerful emotions more than women and women expressed powerless emotions (sadness, fear) and happiness more than men. Depending on the type of emotion and interaction partner some shared display rules occurred across culture and gender. The implications of these findings are discussed in relation to cultural dimensions and other cultural characteristics.

Emotion socialization aims to promote children's emotion competence. Children's competence is embedded in cultural contexts that influence caregivers' expectations of appropriateness of children's expression and experience of emotions. Two aspects of emotion competence -individualistic and relational emotion competence -are outlined. They offer a theoretical framework to interpret cultural commonalities and differences in emotion socialization strategies. This review summarizes current knowledge about caregivers' emotion socialization strategies toward children's negative emotional expressions and related behaviors in cultural perspective. The number of empirical studies in cultures outside of United States remains low. Nonetheless, the available evidence describes a range of emotion socialization strategies that are embedded in caregiving, and their consequences for children's emotion development. Besides several commonalities across cultures, we describe differences in the degree to which strategies are endorsed by caregivers as well as some of the qualitative information that point to cultural variations. Finally, we note gaps in the literature and suggest future research directions.

This study examined emotional responding (sympathy and distress) and prosocial behavior as well as their relations across four cultures in a specific context. Preschool children (N = 212) from two Western cultures, Germany and Israel, and two South-East Asian cultures, Indonesia and Malaysia, participated in this study. Children's emotional reactions and prosocial behavior were observed when interacting with an adult in a quasi-experimental situation. Results showed that children from the two South-East Asian cultures, as compared to children from the two Western cultures, displayed more self-focused distress and less prosocial behavior. Across cultures, a positive relation between sympathy and prosocial behavior and a negative relation between self-focused distress and prosocial behavior were found. The strengths of these relations were moderated by culture. These results are discussed with regard to their cultural meaning in the specific experimental situation as well as to general culture-specific characteristics.Keywords: cross-cultural comparison; distress; observation study; preschool-children; prosocial behavior; sympathy Wolfgang Friedlmeier is now at the Department of Psychology, Grand Valley State University, MI, USA.Parts of this study were supported by grants from the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) to the first author (Tr 169/4-1,2,3). The data collection in Israel was supported by grants from the Lion Foundation Tel Aviv/Konstanz, and the data collection in Malaysia and Indonesia was supported by grants from the University of Konstanz to the first author. We wish to express our gratitude to several colleagues for organizing the data collection at these various places: Arie Nadler in Tel Aviv, Israel; Cecilia Essau in Sarawak/Malaysia; and the late Sri Pidada in Bandung/Indonesia. We thank Rachel Seginer, Haifa University, and Holly Bunje, University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, for their valuable comments on earlier drafts. We also wish to thank the anonymous reviewers for their suggestions to improve the manuscript.Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Gisela Trommsdorff, Department of Psychology, Post Box D14, University of Konstanz, Germany. Phone: +49(0)7531-88-2917. Fax: +49(0)7531-88-3039. E-mail: Gisela.Trommsdorff@uni-konstanz.de E-mail addresses of the co-authors: Wolfgang Friedlmeier: friedlmw@gvsu.edu; Boris Mayer: boris.mayer@uni-konstanz.de 1 The terms "empathy" and "sympathy" are sometimes used in a synonymous way. Here, we differentiate the two terms -empathy is the vicarious experience of the other's emotional state and further appraisals may lead -in case of perceived negative emotion (like sadness) of the other person -to sympathy or to distress (see also the definition in the section 'Emotional reactions as part of the prosocial process' on p. 286).

Children's books may provide an important resource of culturally appropriate emotions. This study investigates emotion displays in children's 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 children's storybooks would highlight dominantly positive emotions and that US children's 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 children's 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.

This prospective longitudinal study investigated whether and in what way different functions of attachment relationships are transferred from parents to reciprocal relationship partners in adolescence. Furthermore, the impact of nationality, romantic relationship status, and individual differences in perceived attachment history and current attachment orientation on the timing and extent of transfer was examined. Adolescents from Sweden and Germany were studied over a 12‐ to 15‐month time span. As predicted, the transfer generally unfolded in a step‐by‐step process in cross‐sectional analyses. However, the predicted direction of transfer from parents to peers could not be confirmed in the prospective analyses. Adolescents who had formed a romantic relationship between assessments showed a stronger transfer from parents to peers compared to those who had not. German adolescents had transferred to a larger extent at Time Point 1, but Swedish adolescents caught up by Time Point 2. Finally, the combination of an insecure history with mother and high current anxiety was linked to a particularly high degree of prospective attachment transfer, whereas an insecure history with mother combined with high current avoidance predicted a particularly low degree of prospective transfer.