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Psychophysiological Assessment of the Effectiveness of Emotion Regulation Strategies in Childhood
Published on: February 11, 2017
Culture, emotion regulation, and adjustment
David Matsumoto1, Seung Hee Yoo, Sanae Nakagawa
1Department of Psychology, San Francisco State University, 1600 Holloway Avenue, San Francisco, CA 94132, USA. dm@sfsu.edu
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
|May 29, 2008
Summary
Cultural values shape emotion regulation strategies. Societies prioritizing social order use more suppression, while those valuing autonomy use more reappraisal, impacting overall adjustment.
Area of Science:
- Cross-cultural psychology
- Social psychology
- Emotion regulation
Background:
- Emotion regulation strategies, reappraisal and suppression, vary significantly across cultures.
- Cultural dimensions provide a framework for understanding these variations.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate the relationship between cultural dimensions and emotion regulation strategies (reappraisal and suppression) across 23 countries.
- To examine how cultural values influence the correlation between reappraisal and suppression.
Main Methods:
- Cross-cultural comparison of emotion regulation strategies.
- Correlation analysis between country-level cultural dimensions and emotion regulation scores.
- Analysis of the relationship between reappraisal and suppression within different cultural contexts.
Main Results:
- Cultures emphasizing social order (long-term orientation, embeddedness, hierarchy) showed higher use of suppression.
- Cultures valuing individual autonomy and egalitarianism exhibited lower suppression and a negative correlation between reappraisal and suppression.
- Emotion regulation strategies at the country level were significantly linked to positive and negative adjustment indices.
Conclusions:
- Cultural values significantly predict the prevalence and interplay of emotion regulation strategies.
- Societal emphasis on social order versus individual autonomy shapes emotion regulation, with implications for psychological adjustment.
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