Cultural regulation of emotion: individual, relational, and structural sources

Abstract

The most prevalent and intense emotional experiences differ across cultures. These differences in emotional experience can be understood as the outcomes of emotion regulation, because emotions that fit the valued relationships within a culture tend to be most common and intense. We review evidence suggesting that emotion regulation underlying cultural differences in emotional experience often takes place at the point of emotion elicitation through the promotion of situations and appraisals that are consistent with culturally valued relationships. These regulatory processes depend on individual tendencies, but are also co-regulated within relationships—close others shape people's environment and help them appraise events in culturally valued ways—and are afforded by structural conditions—people's daily lives “limit” the opportunities for emotion, and afford certain appraisals. The combined evidence suggests that cultural differences in emotion regulation go well beyond the effortful regulation based on display rules.

Cognitive emotion regulation and psychopathology across cultures: A comparison between six European countries

“…Given the cross-sectional nature of our investigation we are not able to conclude how these differences developed; however researchers have argued that these differences can be explained by differences on cultural variables (De Leersnyder et al, 2013). Two cultural variable that might explain the observed differences are Hofstede's cultural dimensions power distance and uncertainty avoidance (Hofstede, Hofstede, & Minkov, 2010).…”

“…Research shows that there are cross-cultural differences in cognitive emotion regulation, however, studies have been limited to comparing cultural extremes such as European American and East Asian cultures-as a result, much less is known about the differences in emotion regulation between different European countries (De Leersnyder, Boiger, & Mesquita, 2013;Matsumoto, Yoo, & Fontaine, 2008;Wong, 2009). The present study examined differences between six European countries so as to better understand if, and how, less extreme cultural differences might contribute to variations in cognitive emotion regulation.…”

Cross Cultural Variation in Emotion Regulation: A Systematic Review

“…1 Emotional experiences may be similar across different cultures. 2 Peeping in to the background, the concept about emotion regulation has been conceived by researchers in different ways. It refers to all means, intrinsic or extrinsic, of appraising and adjusting emotion reactions in order to establish and maintain good relationships.…”

“…12 Regulation more often takes the shape of re-appraisal, when other persons/conditions provide different perspective on the emotion situation. 2 What are possible explanations for cross-cultural variations of emotion regulation? How and why might cultures differ in their use of emotion reappraisal and emotion suppression?…”

Emotion at Stake—The Role of Stake Size and Emotions in a Power-to-Take Game Experiment in China with a Comparison to Europe

“…Information on possible cultural differences is relevant from an emotion-regulation point of view as well as from a globalization perspective. Only recently, research has focused on the fact that context-in particular culture-matters with regard to emotion regulation [32,[38][39][40]. For instance, the negative impact of emotion suppression tends to be moderated in Asian cultures ( [41], see also [42]) as, different from the American-European value system, the core regulation goal of the Chinese value system is downregulation of both positive and negative emotions in order to maintain interpersonal harmony [43].…”