My Good Is Better Than Your Good
Tsai et al.1 wrote a fascinating article examining how ideal affect varies across culture. These preferences are established at an early age. Children’s storybooks at least reflect and perhaps help establish this preference.
To quote Tsai et al.:
Most people say they want to “feel good”. However, people differ in the specific “good” states they want to feel. Whereas some people want to feel excited, enthusiastic, and other high arousal positive states (HAP), others want to feel calm, peaceful, and other low arousal positive states (LAP).
This statement is immediately obvious, yet I must say, I hadn’t previously considered preferences and the nature of positive states. How much projecting do we do? “You should feel happy because every thing is calm.”
With so much emphasis on meditative and mindful practices both to improve quality of living and to help in therapy, I wonder to what extent this emphasis simply ignores preference. How much of our acceptance of others is contingent on having a congruent preference for positive states? Is it appropriate to make a change in preference a major aim of therapy?
“Learn mindfulness. You’ll feel better.” Could this statement simply be wrong for many people?
Individualistic cultures, such as American culture, encourage members to influence others (i.e. assert personal needs and change others’ behaviors to fit those needs [high arousal activities]) more than collectivistic cultures. In contrast, collective cultures, such as many East Asian cultures, encourage their members to adjust to other (i.e. suppress personal need to accommodate others’ needs [low arousal activities]) more than individualistic cultures.
It would be very American to ask people to adopt the East Asian positive state preference. How very high arousal is it to ask others to prefer low arousal activities. Do as I say, not as I do. The desire for control is palpable.
Preferences are established at a very early age.
European American preschoolers preferred excited (vs. calm) smiles and activities more and perceived an excited (vs. calm) smile as happier than did Taiwanese Chinese preschoolers... To assess whether these differences were due to exposure to cultural products, we compared the affective content of best-selling storybooks in the United States and Taiwan. As predicted, American bestsellers contained significantly more excited (vs. calm) expressions, wider smiles, and more arousing activities than did Taiwanese bestsellers.
In other words, stories make the reader.
-
Tsai JL, Louie JY, Chen EE, Uchida Y. Learning what feelings to desire: socialization of ideal affect through children's storybooks. Personality and social psychology bulletin. 2007;33(1):17-30. Available at: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17178927. ↩
Musings
Reader Comments (4)
Interesting! I'm going to have to think about this one. Both our boys were read to, but I had a lot of input into their book selection - it makes me wonder, definitely, what effect that had. I'm going to show this to them and see what they think. :)
Imagine how much more they read in school :)
Cole,
I think it's more the personality of parents that create the reader than the culture of the country a child grows up in. When a parent reads (lives or moves) with enthusiasm, a child comes to expect and appreciate animation. For children who grow up with parents who are calmer in their delivery of the story (whether we're talking books or handling life's stresses), they tend to appreciate peacefulness...
It has to do with culture, but it may be much more immediate than the culture of the country. A child's preference may be for a style that their own parents/primary caregiver uses.
Gayle McCain
Gayle,
It's not me your having a problem with. It's the authors of the cited study. Don't shoot the messenger.
You'd probably be disgusted to learn how little parents affect a child's personality, temperament, disposition or just way about life. Study after study show this fact. Parents can traumatize a kid, and then adversely affect his development. As long as they parent 'adequately,' the kid is a reflection of his genes and his life experiences, of which home plays a small roll because, well, adequate parenting insures a measure of consistency, routine, and stability. Home is as expected, life away from home is novel, strange, full of challenges and other a feast of learning.
Again, don't shoot the messenger :)