Conversely, negative, unsupportive parental reactions (i.e. warm, sensitive responses) to children’s emotions are associated with (i) emotional competence, (ii) positive emotion self-awareness and (iii) children’s emotion regulation. The impact of parents on children’s emotional processes are familiar from empirical studies, which found that positive, supportive parental interactions (i.e. Consequently, these parental emotion-related socialisation behaviours are likely to have an effect on (i) emotional experience, (ii) emotional expression, (iii) emotion regulation and emotion-related behaviour, (iv) acquisition of regulatory processes, (v) understanding of emotions and emotion regulation, (vi) quality of the parent-child relationship and (vii) schemas about the self, relationships and the world. For example, such parental emotion-related socialisation behaviours include parental reactions to children’s emotional expressions, discussions regarding emotions with children and parental emotional expressiveness, which can be used to teach children and model appropriate emotional control and expression in accordance with situational demands.

In a heuristic model put forth by, parental emotion-related socialisation behaviours are influenced by both the characteristics of (i) the child, (ii) the parent, (iii) the culture and the aspects of the specific context in which they occur. Emotions are learned within the family too, where parents play a primary role and children learn about emotions and emotion regulation through their parents’ responses to their emotions. Through emotional socialisation, individuals learn to express, understand, and regulate emotion during childhood, and these abilities are closely linked to social interactions of children. įunding: This research was supported by grants from the NAP SUG to GE (M4081597, 2015-2021).Ĭompeting interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.ĭata Availability: The datasets generated during and/or analysed during the current study is available in the open access institutional data repository (DR-NTU) at the link. Received: FebruAccepted: SeptemPublished: September 30, 2021Ĭopyright: © 2021 Neoh et al. PLoS ONE 16(9):Įditor: Srinivas Goli, University of Western Australia, AUSTRALIA Future studies can look to investigate this relationship further in different countries in light of cultural variation in parenting styles and emotion experience, expression and regulation.Ĭitation: Neoh MJY, Carollo A, Bonassi A, Mulatti C, Lee A, Esposito G (2021) A cross-cultural study of the effect of parental bonding on the perception and response to criticism in Singapore, Italy and USA. The findings align with past research on the role of the parent-child relationship in the socio-emotional development of children as well as providing insight into a specific aspect in social interaction perception and response to criticism, being affected. US American participants were found to have a significantly higher tendency to perceive criticism as destructive compared to Italian and Singaporean participants. Higher levels of parental care predicted a lower tendency to perceive criticism as destructive while higher levels of parental overprotection predicted a higher tendency to perceive criticism as destructive. Parental care, overprotection and country were found to be significant predictors of a tendency to perceive criticism as destructive. Adult participants ( n = 444) completed the Parental Bonding Inventory (PBI) and measures of criticism.

Hence, the present study investigated the relationship of parental bonding and the perception and response to criticism in three different countries–Singapore, Italy and USA. As criticism involves negative emotional reactions and emotion regulation, the parent-child relationship is likely to influence an individual’s perception and response to criticism. Parenting practices and dimensions of the parent-child relationship have been associated with social and emotional processes in children. Parents play a primary and crucial role in emotional socialisation processes in children where individuals learn the expression, understanding and regulation of emotions.

Parenting across diverse contexts