How Emotional Socialization Shapes Asian American Mental Health: A Cultural Perspective
By Caitlin Dang, LMHCA, MACP
Emotions don’t grow in isolation—they’re shaped by culture, family, and the messages we receive about how to express or hide them. For Asian American families, emotional socialization is deeply intertwined with values around family honor, interdependence, and emotional restraint.
What Is Emotional Socialization?
Emotional socialization is how caregivers shape our emotional experiences and responses—from the way they react to our feelings, to how they model their own. It plays a key role in our ability to express or suppress emotions, and ultimately, to self-regulate.
How Western and Asian Cultural Models Differ
Western parenting often emphasizes validating emotions and helping children name and express feelings. In contrast, Asian American families may lean toward minimizing emotional expression to preserve family harmony, avoid shame, or respect hierarchy. These approaches aren’t wrong—they reflect different cultural values.
The Role of Parents (and Their Emotions)
Parents' own emotional regulation has a huge impact on their children's development. Research shows that fathers and mothers may socialize emotions differently, and both their behaviors and beliefs about emotions shape how children learn to cope.
When Cultural Messages Conflict
Many Asian American children grow up navigating two emotional worlds—home and society. While schools and peers might value openness, home may encourage emotional restraint. This can create confusion or internalized distress if not explored with cultural sensitivity.
Why This Matters for Mental Health
Understanding these dynamics helps reduce shame and self-blame. It also provides a framework for intergenerational healing and more compassionate therapeutic approaches. Therapy can be a powerful space to unpack these layered messages and rewrite our emotional narratives.
A Culturally Responsive Approach
Rather than labeling certain parenting styles as “maladaptive,” it’s more helpful to ask: what cultural function does this serve? Mental health support that honors these values—while also helping clients expand emotional flexibility—can create deep, lasting change.
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Full Research Paper
Systems impact every individual’s development and when examining emotional socialization, there are a few systems that have been correlated to influence emotional socialization. The process of “Emotion socialization includes caregiver behaviors, both overt and covert, that influence which emotions youth experience, youths’ decisions to express or suppress emotional expressions, and how they go about expressing emotions” (Morelen & Thomassin, 2013, p. 169). Examining emotional socialization is important to examine due to the potential outcomes of one’s ability to express or suppress emotions. Emotional socialization looks vastly different across cultures and ethnicities allowing researchers to look further into the implications of the different approaches to emotional socialization. This literature review addresses the parental role in emotional socialization and its significance as well as the cultural context of emotional socialization in Asian Americans. Emotional socialization of Asian Americans looks different from other ethnic groups in America due some universal themes such as “history of racism and discrimination, varying degrees of acculturation, collectivist mentality, preserving family honor, hierarchical and patriarchal system, as well as maintaining top down communication” (Morelen & Thomassin, 2013, p. 172). Areas to be examined are parental emotional regulation, differences in paternal and maternal socialization, cultural influences of emotional socialization and its potential outcomes, and implications moving forward. In understanding and observing how different cultural values influence the role parents play in emotional socialization, researchers and clinicians can begin to develop a greater understanding of the Asian American experience and create clinical interventions that encourage adaptive emotional socialization.
Emotional Socialization
Emotions can be defined as the “processes of establishing, maintaining, or disrupting the relations between the person and the internal or external environment, when such relations are significant to the individual” and there are three processes that elicit emotion which are: (a) the person’s appreciation of an event, (b) feelings that monitor the significance of an event, and (c) the way a person deals with an event (Campos, Campos, & Barrett, 1989, p. 395). Emotional socialization is multifaceted and there are a number of influences that impact the emotional socialization of an individual. It has been researched that “The caregiver's role in modulating levels of arousal is viewed as especially important in light of the stabilities of individual differences in emotional reactivity. The possibility that autonomic reactions also have powerful direct and indirect social communicative consequences” (Campos, Campos, & Barrett, 1989, p. 400). It is clear there is direct correlation between the parental role in emotional socialization, and ultimately, emotional regulation.
Parental Role in Emotional Socialization
As infants, we rely on our primary caregiver to teach us how to regulate our emotions both overtly and covertly. The three commonly researched ways in which European American parents directly socialize their children are: “parent reactions to children’s emotion, parent expressiveness, and parent–child discussion of emotion” (Baker, Fenning, & Crnic, 2011, p. 412-413). When discussing emotional socialization of an individual, researchers are not only looking at the individual's ability to emotionally regulate, but also look at the parent’s ability to. This is because “parental emotion regulation is of utmost importance due to the degree of parental involvement in interventions for childhood emotional and behavioral disorders, which are often aimed at promoting child self-regulation” (Hajal & Paley, 2020, p. 403). Even within examining parental roles, one must consider the difference between paternal and maternal influences in emotional socialization.
In the study by Baker, Fenning, & Crnic (2011), researched the differences between how the roles of mother and father influence emotional socialization and social competence in the research group. The research concluded that “Fathers’ emotion-coaching approach to socialization was predicted by important cognitive and contextual factors, including fathers’ attitudes toward emotion and children’s social functioning” (Baker, Fenning, & Crnic, 2011, p. 425). This indicated that the societal role of fathers impacts how infants react and respond to their parental figures. It was found, “In contrast, mothers exhibited less overall coherence in emotion socialization. Although maternal attitudes toward emotion predicted all socialization behaviors, complex ties to child competencies were apparent” (Baker, Fenning, & Crnic, 2011, p. 425). This research is significant in bringing to light how parents can use their differing roles and influence to most effectively teach their children emotional socialization. That being said, there are still many limitations to this study that call for further research. It would be beneficial to explore how the parents’ attitudes towards emotions are formed and how those attitudes impact emotional socialization.
Another study that explores emotional socialization is N.J. Hajal and B. Paley’s (2020) and it primarily explores how parents can promote healthy emotional socialization through parental intervention. They believe, “a major next step in the effort to promote healthy emotional development is to improve the field’s understanding of the most proximal contributor to parent ESBs: parents’ own experience and regulation of emotions in the context of caregiving” (Hajal & Paley, 2020, p. 403). Similarly to Baker, Fenning, & Crnic, this study recognizes the vitality of examining the parental role in emotional socialization. There are a multitude of ways for parents to adequately socialize their children, with acknowledgement that “adequate” is broadly defined and there is not yet an established understanding of what is “best.” However, “As parents become more competent in both self-regulating and coregulating, they may begin to recognize that there is value in children having a full range of emotional experiences, including even those that may be quite stressful, when they have supportive parents who can help them navigate the experience” (Hajal & Paley, 2020, p. 414). This study holds parents responsible for their role in regulating both their own emotions and their children. Interventions must begin at the parental level when addressing emotional socialization of a child.
While these research studies have greatly benefitted psychology, they both focus on the emotional socialization of individuals from a Eurocentric viewpoint that fails to regard cultural, societal, socioeconomic, and racial differences. There requires greater understanding and research on the nuances of emotional socialization and the many factors that influence it. Overall, the research clearly indicates parental emotional socialization is necessary in child emotional socialization.
Emotional Socialization of Asian Americans
When researching the parental role in emotional socialization, the parent’s cultural values that contrast with European American values must be considered. The study by Saw & Okazaki (2010) examines the racial differences between White American and Asian American college students and how their socialization impacts their current experiences and affective distress. It has been culturally accepted that white Americans should “operate from an emotion-coaching philosophy characterized by awareness and attention to emotions with goals of validating emotions, teaching children to verbally label their emotions, and helping children deal with negative emotions,” which has been correlated with positive social functioning in their offspring (Saw & Okazaki, 2010, p. 82). This differs from normative Asian parenting styles due to their difference in values. It is more common for Asian parents to dismiss negative emotions such as sadness and anger and it is “suggested that adherence to Asian cultural values, such as interdependence and self-restraint, moderated the relationship between emotional suppression (i.e., inhibition of emotional expression) and negative social consequences” (Saw & Okazaki, 2010, p. 84). This is one of many studies that have found that Asian Americans experience greater degrees of distress than their white counterparts. The research indicates that emotional suppression is positively correlated with affective distress with acknowledgment that there are still limitations to this study. The study was done at Midwestern University with a predominantly white population where Asian Americans could be greatly affected by their minority status and factors such as racial prejudice, acculturation levels, and environment may impact test results (Saw & Okazaki, 2010, p. 90). This study calls for further research in how Asian Americans make meaning of their family socialization based on messages from their family’s cultural values and those of the American ones.
The research conducted by Morelen & Thomassin (2013) delves further into the impact of culture on emotional socialization and observes additional minority groups such as African Americans, Latin Americans, as well as Asian Americans. In much of the previous research, the focus has been around what emotional socialization processes are “adaptive” and “maladaptive”, however, those practices may not apply to other ethnic groups due to their cultural difference (Morelen & Thomassin, 2013, p. 168). The research is useful in identifying different strategies of parenting styles in various ethnicities, however, does not take into full account of “collectivistic values versus individualistic values, acculturation, immigration status, spirituality, family structure, and views on children’s roles” which may all impact emotional socialization (Morelen & Thomassin, 2013, p. 178). When looking at cultural and ethnic differences, researchers must be mindful that there is no “one size fits all,” as the research is often compared to European American practices.
Conclusion
The research indicates there is a clear correlation that emotional socialization is deeply connected to child-parent interactions and bringing in ethnicity and cultural differences to the conversation will greatly benefit Asian Americans who do not fall in the conventional standards of Eurocentric emotional socialization. When examining emotional socialization, nearly all of the research points to the necessity for parents to be able to self-regulate their own emotions, and in lieu, co-regulate their children (Baker, Fenning, & Crnic, 2011; Campos, Campos, & Barrett, 1989; Hajal & Paley, 2020; Morelen & Thomassin, 2013; Saw & Okazaki, 2010). Of the research that includes ethnicity, ethnic groups are often compared to white Americans (Morelen & Thomassin, 2013; Saw & Okazaki, 2010). Even within the broader term of “Asian American,” there are sub ethnicities that differ from one another in terms of culture and values. When assessing emotional socialization of Asian Americans, researchers must be culturally sensitive to what is deemed adaptive versus maladaptive, consider who is being compared to who, and what sub ethnic group are being evaluated. It is crucial for healthcare professionals to begin exploring the potential avenues that lead to the improvement of well-being in Asian Americans and that begins with culturally competent research.
Sources
Baker, J. K., Fenning, R. M., & Crnic, K. A. (2011). Emotion socialization by mothers and fathers: Coherence among behaviors and associations with parent attitudes and children’s social competence. Social Development, 20(2), 412–430. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9507.2010.00585.x
Campos, J. J., Campos, R. G., & Barrett, K. C. (1989). Emergent themes in the study of emotional development and emotion regulation. Developmental Psychology, 25(3), 394–402. https://doi.org/10.1037/0012-1649.25.3.394
Hajal, N. J., & Paley, B. (2020). Parental emotion and emotion regulation: A critical target of study for research and intervention to promote child emotion socialization. Developmental Psychology, 56(3), 403–417. https://doi.org/10.1037/dev0000864
Morelen, D., & Thomassin, K. (2013). Emotion socialization and ethnicity: An examination of practices and outcomes in African American, Asian American, and Latin American families. The Yale journal of biology and medicine, 86(2), 168-178.
Saw, A., & Okazaki, S. (2010). Family emotion socialization and affective distress in Asian American and White American college students. Asian American Journal of Psychology, 1(2), 81–92. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0019638
