Filial Piety as a Universal Construct: From Cultural Norms to Psychological Motivations

About this Research Topic

Background

Social science researchers often define filial piety as a set of norms, values, and practices regarding how children should behave toward their parents. Drawing on this approach, contributions to a previous Frontiers Research Topic, "Filial Piety in the Globalized World", featured norms-based research using various approaches and understandings of filial piety to investigate and measure filial piety around the world. In contrast to this focus on cultural norms, the current Research Topic features contributions that apply the Dual Filial Piety Model (DFPM; Yeh & Bedford in 2003), a contextualized personality approach to the study of filial piety that focuses on two universal human motivations in the context of the parent-child relationship that is suitable for application in any society or culture.

The DFPM casts parent-child interaction as the core context for understanding reciprocal and authoritarian filial motivations: 1) The reciprocal filial motivation reflects the need for interpersonal relatedness. It develops out of genuine affection from long-term positive interaction with one’s parents in daily life and manifests in terms of children’s voluntary support behaviors as expressions of love and care for their parents. 2) The authoritarian filial motivation reflects the need for social belonging and collective identity. It develops through children’s normative reactions to satisfying parental demands or expectations and entails suppressing one’s own wishes to comply with one’s parents’ wishes.

Because it focuses on universal human motivations and not on social norms, the DFPM may be applied in any cultural context and at various levels of analysis. Although there is a substantial body of research applying the DFPM in Chinese societies on a range of topics from adolescent wellbeing to eldercare, research from other societies and research comparing or critiquing the DFPM with competing models is minimal.

We invite submission of empirical or conceptual papers that apply the DFPM, compare it with other models of filial piety, or that critique it. Research may be conducted at any level of analysis—individual, group, societal, or cross-cultural—on a broad range of topics. The scope of contributions may include, but is not limited to:
• Investigation of the implications of filial motivation for adolescent development, psychosocial well-being, parent-child conflict, adolescent autonomy, or moral development.
• Examination of the structural properties of the parent–child relationship, which can reflect meaningful individual, group, or cultural differences in interaction patterns with parents.
• Investigation of the implications of filial motivation for population aging policy or the implementation of government eldercare programs.

Keywords: filial piety, adolescent development, population aging, eldercare, psychosocial adjustment, public health policy, morality, contextualized personality, social norms, filial obligation, filial expectation, intergenerational relations

Important note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.

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