Are Preschoolers' Neurobiological Stress Systems Responsive to Culturally Relevant Contexts?

Adults are biologically responsive to context, and their responses to particular situations may differ across cultures. However, are preschoolers' biological systems also responsive to situational contexts and cultures? Here, we show that children's neurobiological stress responses, as indexed by salivary cortisol, are activated and responsive to psychosocial stressors relevant to their sociocultural emphases. By examining cortisol changes across different contexts among 138 preschoolers living in the United States, China, and Japan, we found that an achievement-related stressor elicited an increased cortisol response among Chinese preschoolers, whereas interpersonal-related stressors elicited an increased cortisol response among Japanese preschoolers. By contrast, U.S. preschoolers showed decreased cortisol responses after these stressors but consistently higher levels of anticipatory responses to separation at the beginning of each session. Our findings suggest that children's neurobiological stress systems may be a critical biological mechanism allowing societal-level cultural phenomena to be embodied in individual-level responses, even among preschoolers.

Emotion expression and regulation in three cultures: Chinese, Japanese, and American preschoolers' reactions to disappointment.

There are strong cultural norms for how emotions are expressed, yet little is known about cultural variations in preschoolers' outward displays and regulation of disappointment. Chinese, Japanese, and American preschoolers' (N = 150) displays of emotion to an undesired gift were coded across both social and nonsocial contexts in a "disappointing gift" paradigm. Generalized estimating equations revealed that, regardless of culture, when children received a disappointing gift, they showed more positive expressions of emotion ("fake smile") in social contexts (in the presence of unfamiliar and familiar examiners) relative to when they were alone, suggesting that preschool-aged children are able to mask their disappointment with positive displays. However, children's emotion expressions varied across both cultures and contexts. American children were more positively and negatively expressive than Japanese children and were more negatively expressive than Chinese children. Chinese and Japanese preschoolers verbally reported more negative emotions but showed more neutral expressions than American preschoolers when receiving the disappointing gift. In addition, across different contexts of the task, there were subtle differences in how Chinese and Japanese children regulated their emotional expressions, with Chinese children showing similar levels of neutral expressions (e.g., "poker face") across different contexts in the task. Thus, our findings highlight the importance of understanding cultural meanings and practices underlying emotion development during early childhood.

Neural signatures of child cognitive emotion regulation are bolstered by parental social regulation in two cultures.

Caregiver impact on the efficacy of cognitive emotion regulation (ER; i.e. reappraisal) during childhood is poorly understood, particularly across cultures. We tested the hypothesis that in children from Japan and the USA, a neurocognitive signature of effective reappraisal, the late positive potential (LPP), will be bolstered by cognitive scaffolding by parents, and explored whether the two cultures differed in whether mere physical proximity of parents provides similar benefit. Five-to-seven-year-olds (N = 116; nJapan = 58; nUSA = 58) completed a directed reappraisal task (EEG-recorded) in one of three contexts: (i) parent-scaffolding, (ii) parent-present and (iii) parent-absent. Across cultures, those in the parent-scaffolding group and parent-present group showed effective reappraisal via the LPP relative to those in the parent-absent group. Results suggest that scaffolding is an effective method through which parents in these two cultures buttress child ER, and even parental passive proximity appears to have a meaningful effect on child ER across cultures.