A study examining cultural characteristics of infant behavior found that infants in South Korea and Japan cried more when separated from their mothers and left alone in a strange room than infants in the United States and Czech Republic. The paper was published in. International Journal of Behavioral Development.
The main theoretical framework in psychology used to explain emotional bonds between humans and their importance throughout the lifespan is attachment theory, proposed by John Bowlby in the mid-20th century. According to this theory, emotional attachment patterns begin to develop during infancy through interactions between infants and caregivers.
One of the main research procedures for assessing the quality of infants’ attachment to their caregivers is the strange situation procedure. This procedure was developed by Mary Ainsworth, a famous 20th century attachment researcher, and her colleagues to observe how children use their caregivers as a secure base and how they respond to separation and reunion.
This procedure begins by placing the child in an unfamiliar room with toys, with the parent present. Then a stranger comes in, the caregiver leaves, the child is left with the stranger or alone for a while, and then the caregiver returns. An important observation is whether the child cries during separation and how the child behaves after the caregiver returns.
For example, securely attached children are typically upset by separation, but are comforted by their caregivers and return to play after reunion. In contrast, avoidantly attached children tend to show little distress and may ignore or avoid their caregivers upon reunion.
Another classification is “anxiety-tolerant” (also called ambivalent) attachment. These children tend to cry profusely during separation and resist comfort from their caregivers upon reunion. Finally, children with disorganized attachment patterns may be confused, contradictory, or display anxious behavior toward their caregivers after reunification.
Study author Tomotaka Umemura and colleagues point out that although strange situation procedures emphasize the importance of context, previous studies have not investigated the cultural characteristics of infant behavior in detail. Of note, past research has incorrectly classified East Asian infants as having an “insecurity tolerant” attachment style based on highly distressed reactions during the procedure.
The researchers hypothesized that this intense crying may reflect cultural differences rather than actual insecure attachment. In East Asian cultures, babies are rarely separated from their mothers in daily life. This means that the strange situation procedure is not just mildly stressful, but extremely unfamiliar and frightening. To test this, the researchers set out to find out whether there were differences in the level of crying during the procedure in East Asian infants compared to Western infants.
The researchers compared infant behavior recorded from several previously published studies. Western infants were represented by a group of 106 American infants in a 1978 study conducted by Ainsworth and colleagues, and a group of 66 Czech infants in a 2023 study. East Asian infants were represented by a group of 87 Korean infants from Daegu, a group of 45 Japanese infants from Sapporo, and a group of 81 Japanese infants from the Hiroshima area. The South Korean group was from a 2005 study, and the Japanese data were from studies published in 2018 and 2022.
The study authors report that research assistants coded the crying behavior of East Asian and Czech infants and recorded the length of the episode for each strange situation procedure. Information about the crying behavior of infants in the United States was obtained from Ainsworth’s original 1978 book.
The results showed that American and Czech infants generally cried less than Korean and Japanese infants. Specifically, when infants were separated from their mothers and left completely alone, infants in Japan and South Korea cried significantly more than infants in the United States. Additionally, East Asian infants cried much more than American or Czech infants when a stranger entered the room to comfort the infant who was alone.
However, despite these intense reactions during separation, the infants did not show significantly greater levels of crying when reunited with their mothers (all but one of the Japanese groups cried more during the final reunion episode compared to Czech and American infants).
“When infants were separated from their mothers during the second separation (left alone and then with a stranger), East Asian infants were more likely to exhibit higher levels of crying compared to Western infants. These results were consistent across three East Asian samples from South Korea and Japan. Despite these higher levels of crying during separation, East Asian infants did not exhibit different levels of crying compared to Western infants during reunion episodes, with the exception of the first sample of Japanese infants, who showed higher levels of crying compared to Western infants.” the authors concluded.
This study contributes to scientific knowledge about cross-cultural differences in infant behavior and suggests that researchers should be cautious about classifying highly distressed non-Western infants as “insecurely attached.”
However, it should be noted that the data on infants in the United States was collected almost half a century earlier than the most recent data used in the study. Cultural drift may have occurred during this period, and the generalizability of the results to modern Americans is limited.
Furthermore, despite representing the same culture, the two groups of Japanese infants cried markedly differently in some situations. Similarly, in some episodes of the study procedure, Czech children’s cries were not significantly different from those of East Asian infants. For this reason, inferences about cultural differences drawn from this study should be made with caution, as observed differences may reflect differences in research procedures or differences between specific groups of infants rather than stable differences across cultures.
The paper, “Crying Procedures in Strange Situations: A Comparison of East Asian and Western Infants,” was written by Tomotaka Umemura, Kyung Jin Mi, Kiyomi Kondo Ikemura, Lenka Rashinova, Kyonosuke Handa, Shu Yu, and Kota Yoshikawa.
