What constitutes a compassionate response? The important role of culture.

Abstract

American compassionate responses (i.e., sending sympathy cards) focus more on the positive (e.g., comforting memories) and less on the negative (e.g., the pain of someone's death) than German compassionate responses, partly because of cultural differences in how much people want to avoid feeling negative (i.e., avoided negative affect [ANA]). However, are these culture-specific compassionate responses considered more comforting and compassionate within their respective cultural context? We predicted that Americans would find responses that focus on the negative less and those that focus on the positive more comforting and compassionate than Germans will and that ANA would mediate these differences. In Study 1, 152 Americans and 315 Germans reported their ANA and rated how comforting they considered receiving different sympathy cards. As predicted, Americans found sympathy cards that contained negative content less and cards that contained positive content more comforting than Germans did. In Studies 2a and 2b, to examine whether these culture-specific conceptualizations of a comforting response would generalize to how people conceptualize a compassionate face, 118 Americans and 80 Germans selected stimuli that most resembled a compassionate (or happy) face using a reverse correlation task. As predicted, people's mental representation of a compassionate face contained more happiness/less sadness in an American than German context. Across studies, ANA partially mediated the cultural differences. This research demonstrates that responses that are intended to be compassionate might not be considered equally compassionate and comforting across cultures, which has implications for relief efforts, which are often organized internationally.

People in Ecuador and the United States conceptualize compassion differently: The role of avoided negative affect.

“…To understand why potential cultural differences might emerge, we also assess ANA (which is culturally shaped; Koopmann-Holm & Tsai, 2014). We examine whether the association between ANA and conceptualizations of compassionate faces, which previous research has found among U.S. American, German, and Chinese samples (e.g., Koopmann-Holm et al, 2021), replicates when we include an Ecuadorian sample. Furthermore, because past research has not yet examined the mechanism through which ANA shapes conceptualizations of a compassionate face, the present work starts to explore this process.…”

“…These cultural differences generalize to what kind of faces people consider to be compassionate. While for U.S. Americans, a face with a slight smile is considered compassionate, for Germans, a face with a somewhat sad and distressed expression is considered compassionate (Koopmann-Holm et al, 2021). Another line of research suggests that like Germans, Chinese participants consider a face with a somewhat sad and distressed expression as more compassionate compared to U.S. Americans (Seow et al, 2024).…”

“…For instance, when people who highly want to avoid feeling negative imagine others' suffering, they will conceptualize a compassionate response in a way that avoids negativity (e.g., by focusing on the silver lining, by expressing a kind smile). Because U.S. Americans want to avoid feeling negative more than Germans do, they feel less comfortable sending sympathy cards that focus on the negative compared to Germans (Koopmann-Holm & Tsai, 2014) and they consider responses (both sympathy cards and faces) that focus on the negative as less comforting and compassionate compared to Germans (Koopmann-Holm et al, 2021). Similarly, because U.S. Americans want to avoid feeling negative more than Chinese people do, U.S. Americans consider faces that contain expressions of sadness as less compassionate compared to Chinese individuals (Seow et al, 2024).…”

“…It was estimated to lie between 0.004 and 0.063 with 95% CI. research on compassion conducted in the United States with U.S. American participants and by U.S. American researchers with their culture-specific mental representation of a compassionate face might not generalize to other cultural contexts, in which compassion is conceptualized differently such as in Ecuador, China, or Germany (Koopmann-Holm et al, 2021;Seow et al, 2024).…”

“…In the present study, using a multimethod approach, we examine cultural differences (and why they occur) between Ecuador and the United States in two aspects of how people conceptualize compassion: First, like in past research (e.g., Koopmann-Holm et al, 2021), we examine how people conceptualize compassionate faces using a reverse correlation task (e.g., Dotsch & Todorov, 2012). Second, we examine how people conceptualize compassionate responses by asking participants to describe the most compassionate way to respond to someone who has recently lost a loved one using an open-ended response format.…”