Yucatec Maya Children's Responding to Emotional Challenge

Abstract

While the field of affective science has seen increased interest in and representation of the role of culture in emotion, prior research has disproportionately centered on Western, English-speaking, industrialized, and/or economically developed nations. We investigated the extent to which emotional experiences and responding may be shaped by cultural display rule understanding among Yucatec Maya children, an indigenous population residing in small-scale communities in remote areas of Mexico's Yucatan peninsula. Data were collected from forty-two 6- and 10-year-old Yucatec children who completed a resting baseline and a structured disappointing gift task. Children were asked about whether specific emotions are better to show or to hide from others and self-reported the intensity of their discrete positive and negative emotional experiences. We observed and coded expressive positive and negative affective behavior during and after the disappointing gift task, and continuously acquired physiological measures of autonomic nervous system function. These multi-method indices of emotional responding enable us to provide a nuanced description of children's observable and unobservable affective experiences. Results generally indicated that children's understanding of and adherence to cultural display rules (i.e., to suppress negative emotions but openly show positive ones) was evidenced across indices of emotion, as predicted. The current study is a step toward the future of affective science, which lies in the pursuit of more diverse and equitable representation in study samples, increased use of concurrent multimethod approaches to studying emotion, and increased exploration of how emotional processes develop.

Keywords: Children; Culture; Display rules; Emotion; Psychophysiology.

Fig. 1

Proportion of participants who endorsed it being better to “show” (versus “hide”) the five specific discrete emotions. Significantly more older children endorsed happiness as being better to show than younger children and significantly more older children also endorsed happiness as “better to show to others” than all negative emotions. Error bars indicate standard error. ***ps < .01

Fig. 2

The average self-report rating of emotional intensity for the five discrete emotions, assessed at five different time points during the study. Error bars indicate standard error. Children from both age groups reported more experience of happiness than negative emotions (p < .001), but older children self-reported experiencing more happiness and less sadness than younger children. ***ps < .01

Fig. 3

Interaction of age group and gift task phase predicting the proportion of intervals in which participants displayed affective behavior. Error bars indicate standard error. Children displayed more positive than negative affective behavior across both phases of the task and displayed more affective behavior overall during the resolution phase. Older children displayed more affective behavior during the resolution phase than the disappointment phase, although the proportion of younger children’s affective behavior was not significantly different between the two task phases. Finally, older children displayed fewer negative than positive affective behaviors, whereas there was no significant difference in the proportion of negative versus positive affective behaviors displayed for younger children

Fig. 4

Average RSA (respiratory sinus arrythmia) score for younger and older children across resting baseline, disappointment, and resolution phases of the gift task. Error bars indicate standard error. Older children had significantly higher RSA than younger children across all three task phases. RSA for both age groups was significantly lower during the resolution phase than the baseline phase

Fig. 5

Average PEP (pre-ejection period) score for younger and older children across resting baseline, disappointment, and resolution phases of the gift task. Shorter PEP is indicative of greater sympathetic activation. Error bars indicate standard error. There were no significant effects of age, phase, or their interaction