Stereotypes and National Identity: Experiencing the “Emotional Brazilian”

In this article, I examine how stereotypes are deployed in the process of experiencing national identities. Specifically, I analyse how a group of Brazilian academics who have studied in Europe and the United States have dealt with stereotypical notions of Brazilians as “warm people” who establish friendship “easily.” Ideas about a “greater emotionality,” which were often seen as negative from a European colonial perspective, are embraced and re-signified by them as a positive feature of Brazilian national identity, particularly when compared to the supposed “closed nature” of some Europeans. I argue therefore that the presence of such stereotypes contributes to reinforce a subjective sense of Brazilianess and also reveals the negotiations of power relations in the process of elaborating Brazilian national identity.     

网络民意中的情绪与理性

互联网的迅速发展,使广大民众获得了真正自由抒发意见的渠道,促生了网络民意。网络民意犹如一把＂双刃剑＂,一方面为我国的民主化提供了理性选择,另一方面其中的情绪化因素也引起人们的担忧。结合分析＂日记局长事件＂和＂袁腾飞事件＂,阐述了我国网络民意中的情绪化表现及其成因,并论述了网络民意中的理性存在,最后提出了合理引导网络民意的措施。     

Children's Understanding of Emotion Communication in Families

SUMMARY

There is a paucity of research on children's awareness of how emotion communication varies within relationships. Indeed, we operate on the assumption that a very significant function of emotion is to regulate interpersonal interaction. In this essay we discuss how children come to understand such phenomena as: (a) emotional-expressive behavior can have powerful interpersonal consequences; (b) relationship dimensions such as degree of power and closeness interact with intensity of emotion in how emotion is communicated; and (c) maintenance of relationship quality (e.g., equilibrium, attenuation, or deepening) requires different strategies of emotion communication. Among the constructs that we address are several that are useful for understanding the dynamics of interpersonal communication; they have also proven their utility over a considerable period of time. However, these constructs derive from social psychology and family systems; they have not been systematically investigated from a developmental perspective     

Cumulative Risk,Negative Emotionality,and Emotion Regulation as Predictors of Social Competence in Transition to School: A Mediated Moderation Model

The goals of this study were to examine the additive and interactive effects of cumulative risk and child negative emotionality on children's social competence in the transition from preschool to school and to test whether these associations were mediated by child emotion regulation within a sample of 310 low‐income, ethnically diverse boys. Multiple informants and methods were used to measure contextual risk factors and negative emotionality at the ages of 1.5 and two, emotion dysregulation at the age of 3.5, and social competence in the home at the age of five and in school at the age of six. Results indicated that the relation between cumulative risk and emotion dysregulation was amplified for children with higher levels of negative emotionality. In turn, emotion dysregulation predicted lower social competence across both the home and the school contexts. This study represents an early effort to develop an integrative model of social competence by considering joint contributions of contextual risk, negative emotionality, and emotion regulation.     

中国人的情绪性人格特点

情绪性人格维度反映的是个体在做事和人际交往中表现急躁和直爽的程度。本研究依据本土化的中国人人格量表对中国人的情绪性人格维度及其两个次级因素的特点进行了分析,发现个体的性别、年龄、职业和婚姻状况均对情绪性产生不同程度的影响。总体上看,女性比男性的情绪性倾向更高,年龄越大,情绪性程度越低,工人农民与行政管理者和教科文卫人员相比情绪性更明显,而婚姻状况也与年龄和性别一起影响个体的情绪性倾向,而急躁(耐性)和爽直特点的"双高者"和"双低者"也有明显的年龄、职业和婚姻状况差异。     

The Role of Emotional Reactivity,Self‐regulation,and Puberty in Adolescents' Prosocial Behaviors

This study was designed to examine the roles of emotional reactivity, self‐regulation, and pubertal timing in prosocial behaviors during adolescence. Participants were 850 sixth graders (50 percent female, mean age = 11.03, standard deviation = .17) who were followed up at the age of 15. In hierarchical regression models, measures of emotional reactivity, self‐regulation, pubertal timing, and their interactions were used to predict (concurrently and over time) adolescents' prosocial behaviors in the home and with peers. Overall, the findings provide evidence for pubertal and temperament‐based predictors of prosocial behaviors expressed in different contexts. Self‐regulation was positively related to both forms of prosocial behavior, concurrently and longitudinally. Emotional reactivity showed moderately consistent effects, showing negative concurrent relations to prosocial behavior with peers and negative longitudinal relations (4 years later) to prosocial behavior at home. Some curvilinear effects of temperament on prosocial behaviors were also found. Effects of pubertal timing were found to interact with gender, such that boys who were early maturers showed the highest levels of prosocial behavior at home concurrently. Discussion focuses on the role of temperament‐based mechanisms in the expression of prosocial behaviors in different contexts in adolescence.     

Peers’ emotionality and children's academic achievement in second grade: Testing the moderating role of children's behavioral self-regulation

Although there is interest in the role of peers in children's schooling experiences, few researchers have examined associations and related underlying processes between peers’ emotionality, an aspect of temperament, and children's academic achievement. This study evaluated whether target children's (N = 260) own self-regulation, assessed with two behavioral measures, served a moderating function for associations between peers’ emotionality and children's own academic achievement in second grade. There was a positive association between peers’ positive emotionality and reading scores for children with higher self-regulation. Peers’ negative emotionality was negatively related to target children's reading scores, particularly for children with higher self-regulation levels, but was unrelated to math scores. Peers’ positive and negative emotionality did not predict math scores, and there was no strong evidence for the moderating role of target children's self-regulation in this association. This study highlights the potential role of children's self-regulation in modulating peer effects on academic achievement, particularly reading.     

Connections between preschoolers' temperament traits and social behaviors as observed in a preschool setting

A growing literature has focused on the role children's temperament traits play in social behavior, but associations have traditionally been explored through informant report. We utilized a longitudinal, observational approach to (a) examine how children's traits related to their social behaviors when aggregated across the school year; (b) explore how traits and social behavior relate to children's age and sex; and (c) test how prior traits predicted subsequent change in solitary, reticent, and social play, above and beyond mean‐level change in play behavior over the course of the year. Fifty‐three children were observed in their preschool classroom, where coders rated children's traits and social behaviors over the course of one school year (N = 26,673 observations). Results found positive age‐related associations for positive emotionality (PE) and social play. In addition, aggregated traits explained a significant amount of the variance for every social behavior. Prior levels of lower PE, higher negative emotionality (NE), and higher effortful control (EC) predicted more subsequent time spent in reticent play, while NE and EC approached significance as predictors of solitary play. These results emphasize the role of early disposition on mean levels and rates of change in social behavior in a classroom.     

Concurrent and Across Time Prediction of Young Adolescents' Social Functioning: The Role of Emotionality and Regulation

The social functioning of 64 young adolescents (10‐ to 12‐year olds) was examined in relation to negative emotionality and regulation during early adolescence, as well as two, four, and six years earlier. Young adolescents who were viewed as relatively high in social functioning (i.e., high teacher‐rated school social competence; low mother‐ or father‐rated problem behavior) were generally viewed as relatively low on negative emotionality and high on regulatory abilities during early adolescence as well as two, four, and six years earlier. Furthermore, negative emotionality and regulation during early adolescence, and in some cases at previous time periods, contributed unique variance to the prediction of social functioning during early adolescence. Young adolescents who were consistently low in social functioning across time were higher on negative emotionality and lower on regulation than were young adolescents who were consistently high on social functioning over time.     

Preschool Children's Negative Emotionality and Peer Acceptance: The Moderating Role of Sleep

Preschool children's sleep was examined as a moderator of the association between negative emotionality and both peer acceptance and peer rejection. Participants were 115 children (47 percent girls, M age = 4.29 years, SD = .63). Preschool teachers reported on children's negative emotionality (anger/frustration, sadness, and fear). Sleep was measured objectively using actigraphy in the child's home for seven consecutive nights. Peer acceptance and rejection were assessed using children's choices in sociometric interviews. Controlling for potential confounds, moderation analyses revealed that negative emotionality predicted peer acceptance and rejection only among children with poorer sleep quality (lower sleep efficiency, more frequent wake episodes, longer sleep latency), but not better sleep quality. Findings suggest that sleep is important not only for predicting child functioning but also for moderating the adverse effects of negative emotionality on a salient indicator of interpersonal functioning for preschool age children.