Socializing Infants Toward a Cultural Understanding of Expressing Negative Affect: A Bakhtinian Informed Discursive Psychology Approach

Abstract

This article addresses the socialization of emotion expression in infancy. It argues that in order to adequately understand emotion development we need to consider the appraisal of emotion expression through caregivers in mundane, everyday interactions. Drawing on sociocultural and Bakhtinian theorizing, it claims that caregivers' appraisals of infants' emotion expression are dialogically intertwined with broader speech genres or “communicative genres” of a community and the emotional-volitional tone and normative orientations embedded in them. It aims to investigate how communicative genres become visible in early caregiver–infant interactions.

In a comparative study with 20 farming Cameroonian Nso mothers from Kikaikelaki and 20 German middle-class mothers from Muenster and their 3-month-old infants, we investigated discursive practices used by the mothers in reaction to the infants' expression of negative affect. We found distinct patterns of coconstructing the interaction that point to different normative orientations and communicative genres that can be considered to be specific to the two sociocultural contexts. These communicative genres were found to be in line with broader cultural ethnotheories on good child care in these two communities found in previous studies and by other researchers.

Acknowledgments

The present analysis of the data was funded by a scholarship of the German Research Foundation (GRK 772 - List of Projects). I thank Professor Heidi Keller, University of Osnabrueck, and Professor Dr. Arnold Lohaus, University of Bielefeld, for allowing me to use data that were collected in a previous study that was funded by the German Research Foundation (project number KE 263/26-1 and KE 263/49-1-2). I especially thank Dr. Relindis Dzeaye Yovsi for organizing and supervising the data collection in Cameroon and for sharing precious insights into the Nso culture from an indigenous perspective with me. I also thank Kelen Ernesta Fonyuy for translating and transcribing the Nso interactions. I am grateful to the editors Falk Seeger and Manfred Holodynski, three anonymous reviewers, and the members of the “kitchen” meetings at Clark University, Worcester, Massachusetts, USA; University of Salerno, Italy; and University of Trondheim, Norway, for their helpful comments on an earlier draft of this article. I also thank Daina Crafa for proofreading the final version.

Notes

¹The relatively high number of later borns is related to the high fertility rate among the Nso. A later born child hence is more representative of infants among the Nso than a firstborn.

²Although sibling care is a common practice among the Nso and infants are likely to be involved in multiparty interactions, it is not unusual for mothers to play with their infants.

³Although we are aware that the filming situation may have provoked some “visitor behavior” that might not entirely correspond to naturally occurring everyday behavior, we believe that it is not possible to lay aside one's habits that have been acquired in the course of a lifetime and that can, at least partly, be assumed to be subconscious. Moreover, it can be assumed that to the extent that mothers were influenced by observation they would have tried to model what they consider to be a “good mother.” Hence, mothers would produce speech and behavior that they associate with good mothering within their cultural model.