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Emotions tend to be expressed more verbally in the U.S. compared to many non-Western societies.

Many immigrant Asian American parents express affection through nonverbal acts of care and sacrifice.

Acculturative mismatches can lead children to misinterpret implicitly caring parents as unloving.

Since 2015, Pixar’s Inside Out movies have been lauded for promoting emotional literacy among children and caregivers alike. The films anthropomorphize the “basic emotions,” naming and bringing such feelings to life as colorful characters. They go beyond extolling the American pursuit of happiness to normalize people’s natural ranges of emotions, including sadness and anxiety.

Within the history of emotions, this multi-billion dollar-grossing series can be seen as a product of a broader U.S. trend toward emotional expression. Americans’ use of emotional vocabulary has increased since the 1960s, thanks to the growing presence of psychology and popular media. U.S. parenting books emphasize teaching children to label their feelings. Yet, it seems less clear whether this expressiveness has expanded in all U.S. subcommunities.

In particular, the Asian American population has also grown since the 1960s, from 0.6 percent to now over 7 percent of Americans, largely due to immigration. This has created households with acculturative gaps. Different generations within Asian American families may experience cultural divides far wider than those broadly between Boomers and Millennials, or Gen X caregivers and Gen Alpha youth. Many differences center on norms of communication. Verbally explicit emotionality, like that of Inside Out, may feel less familiar to many first-generation Asian American parents. Promoting parental understanding and intentional navigation of this normative mismatch may support household harmony, wellbeing, and parent-child connection.

Mapping out mismatches

As a psychiatrist, I worked with a first-generation Korean American father with somatic symptoms. He once recounted his surprise, not long after immigrating decades ago—but long before Inside Out was imaginable—at a U.S. movie character saying the words “You hurt me.” This devoted father........

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