Emotional arousal in the making of cultural selves

Quinn, Naomi; Mathews, Holly F.

doi:10.1177/1463499616684051

Cited by 12 publications

(6 citation statements)

References 26 publications

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“…Cultural schemas of normativity—and their culturally resonant emotional, moral, and interpersonal orientations, qualities, dispositions, and worldviews—are aimed toward enhancing children’s wellbeing and optimal development in relationship with the cultural worlds in which children reside. Cultural schemas, which involve experientially mediated “clusters of strong associations,” are prototypically catalyzed in conjunction with heightened emotions such as those that are sparked through emotionally galvanizing childrearing practices (Quinn and Mathews, 2016, p. 359). It is proposed that this process takes place during CELF “pep talk” and “time out” data sequences in which morally charged affective stances play a role in shaping culturally preferred patterns of feeling, meaning, and behaving.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Emotion, Morality, and Interpersonal Relations as Critical Components of Children’s Cultural Learning in Conjunction With Middle-Class Family Life in the United States

Sirota

2019

Front. Psychol.

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An enduring question in the cultural study of psychological experience concerns how emotion may play a role in shaping moral aspects of children’s lives as they are mentored into socially preferred ways of understanding and responding to the world at hand. This article brings together approaches from psychological and linguistic anthropology to explore how cultural schemas of normativity are communicated, embodied, and enacted as children participate in day-to-day family activities and routines. Illustrative examples emanate from a videotaped corpus of naturalistic interactional data that document the daily lives of 32 ethnically diverse U.S. middle-class families who reside in the Los Angeles, California metropolitan region. The article employs discourse and narrative analysis to examine how children are apprenticed into perceiving, appraising, and reacting to the emotions of self and others as culturally shaped indicators for proper comportment. Data analysis emphasizes how implicit components of caregivers’ interactions with children (i.e., gesture, gaze, facial expression) intertwine with explicit, verbal communication to constitute intricately layered affective messages that shape the evaluative frames through which children interpret, display, and respond to emotions. The article identifies two culturally salient childrearing practices, “pep talks” and “time outs,” that apprentice children into moral accountable relationships with others by encouraging them to manage their emotions in culturally preferred ways. Study findings suggest that parental communications conveying praise and approval—or conversely indexing disapproval—toward children are emotionally resonant motivational practices in this cultural milieu as children are mentored into culturally meaningful emotional management techniques. The article highlights how children actively employ semiotic socio-communicative resources and it closely traces their sense-making processes in tandem with their discursive contributions to the moment-by-moment interaction. It argues that emotion, morality, and interpersonal relations are critical in shaping children’s acquisition of consensually validated ways of perceiving, feeling, and responding to the phenomena they encounter in their day-to-day lives. This perspective aims toward contextualized understandings that render plausible connections between local contexts of everyday action and broader macro-level discourses and master narratives, such as those associated with a neo-liberal emphasis on cultivating citizens who learn to regulate their emotions on behalf of self and others.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Emotion, Morality, and Interpersonal Relations as Critical Components of Children’s Cultural Learning in Conjunction With Middle-Class Family Life in the United States

Sirota

2019

Front. Psychol.

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“…While the psychic conflict between cooperation and autonomy is universal, cultural mechanisms for resolving this tension vary (Quinn 2006; Quinn and Mathews 2016). In small‐scale, face‐to‐face societies, task assignment helps children identify the techniques and goals of common actions children see others do (Morelli, Rogoff, and Angelillo 2003; Paradise and Rogoff 2009).…”

Section: Autonomy Cooperation and The Contexts Of Socializationmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In their work on the "cultural self," Quinn and Mathews (Quinn 2006;Quinn and Mathews 2016) propose that humans experience a universal psychic conflict between their dependency on others and the necessity of becoming an autonomous individual. Investigating socialization processes can shed light on the cultural solutions humans develop to mitigate this conflict, how these solutions become internalized during childhood, and, ultimately, how cultural selves are formed (Quinn 2005(Quinn , 2006Quinn and Mathews 2016). In this article, we examine how one universal socialization process-that of task assignment-helps BaYaka forager children from the Republic of Congo learn foundational cultural schemas unique to their cultural niche.…”

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confidence: 99%

Socialization, Autonomy, and Cooperation: Insights from Task Assignment Among the Egalitarian BaYaka

Boyette

Lew‐Levy

2020

Ethos

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Across diverse societies, task assignment is a socialization practice that gradually builds children's instrumental skills and integrates them into the flow of daily activities in their community. However, psychosocial tensions can arise when cooperation is demanded from children. Through their compliance or noncompliance, they learn cultural norms and values related to autonomy and obligations to others. Here, we investigate task assignment among BaYaka foragers of the Republic of the Congo, among whom individual autonomy is a foundational cultural schema. Our analysis is based on systematic observations, participant observation, and informal interviews with adults about their perspectives on children's learning and noncompliance, as well as their own learning experiences growing up. We find that children are assigned fewer tasks as they age. However, children's rate of noncompliance remains steady across childhood, indicating an early internalization of a core value for autonomy. Despite demonstrating some frustration with children's noncompliance, adults endorse their autonomy and remember task assignment being critical to their own learning as children. We argue that cross‐cultural variation in children's compliance with task assignments must be understood within a larger framework of socialization as constituted by many integrated and bidirectional processes embedded in a social, ecological, and cultural context. Abstract (French) Dans les diverses sociétés, l'attribution de tâches est une pratique de socialisation précieuse, qui permet de développer progressivement les compétences instrumentales des enfants et les intégrer dans le flux des activités quotidiennes de leur communauté. Dans cet article, nous concentrons notre analyse sur les aspects psychologiques et sociaux de l'attribution de tâches en tant que moments de tension psychosociale où la coopération est demandée aux enfants. En se conformant, ou en ne se conformant pas à ces demandes, ils apprennent les normes et valeurs culturelles liées aux droits individuels à l'autonomie en tension avec la responsabilité d'obéir. Dans le cadre d'une étude de cas, nous étudions les tâches assignées aux enfants parmi les chasseurs‐cueilleurs BaYaka de la République du Congo, parmi lesquels l'autonomie individuelle constitue un schéma culturel fondamental. Les observations comportementales quantitatives et systématiques des tâches assignées aux enfants BaYaka sont contextualisées à l'aide d'une recherche qualitative basée sur l'observation‐participante et des entretiens informels. Des entretiens ont été menés avec des adultes sur leurs perspectives concernant l'apprentissage et le non‐respect des tâches par les enfants, ainsi que sur leurs propres expériences d'apprentissage au cours de leur croissance. Nous avons constaté que les enfants se voient attribuer quantitativement moins de tâches au fur et à mesure qu'ils vieillissent. Cependant, le taux de non‐conformité des enfants reste stable tout au long de l'enfance, ce qui indique une intériorisation pr...

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“…Projects are sequences of activities designed to achieve a goal. For example, in her Mother strand Sarah will promote good hygiene practices (Matson, 2017), model emotional responses to good and bad behavior (Quinn, 2003; Quinn & Mathews, 2016, pp. 372–378), and shape her child’s use of language (Duranti, Ochs, & Schieffelin, 2012) and political values (Quintelier, 2013).…”

Section: The Benefits Of Modularized Livesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Lives as Collections of Strands: An Essay in Descriptive Psychology

Kubovy

2020

Perspect Psychol Sci

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In this article I generalize the notion of multiple self-aspects to create a descriptive framework in which lives are partitioned into containers of activities called strands. Strands are nearly decomposable life modules, structured, stable, and concurrent longitudinal streams of extended duration whose momentary cross-sections constitute self-aspects. They are differentiated by five features: the person’s role, the cast, the setting, norms and values, and habits and routines. Strands contain projects and episodes and are replete with narrative. Each strand is continuous (i.e., strands persist when a person moves between them), and for the most part strands are mutually asynchronous. From a first-person perspective, the strands are continuous and concurrent, but only one strand is in the foreground at a given time (i.e., transitions between strands are akin to a figure-ground reversal). Furthermore, a life is different from the sum of its strands: It is a nonlinear system that can take on configurations not predictable from a comprehensive description of the individual strands. Two such examples are the achievement of greatness despite severe handicaps and instances of extreme self-sacrifice. I also discuss the research potential of a proposed smartphone app called LifeMaps.

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Emotional arousal in the making of cultural selves

Cited by 12 publications

References 26 publications

Emotion, Morality, and Interpersonal Relations as Critical Components of Children’s Cultural Learning in Conjunction With Middle-Class Family Life in the United States

Emotion, Morality, and Interpersonal Relations as Critical Components of Children’s Cultural Learning in Conjunction With Middle-Class Family Life in the United States

Socialization, Autonomy, and Cooperation: Insights from Task Assignment Among the Egalitarian BaYaka

Lives as Collections of Strands: An Essay in Descriptive Psychology

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