Emotions in collectivist and individualist contexts.

A theory of cultural differences in emotions was tested in a questionnaire study. Hypotheses about the differences between emotion in individualist and collectivist contexts covered different components of emotion: concerns and appraisals, action readiness, social sharing, and belief changes. The questionnaire focused on 6 types of events that were rated as similar in meaning across cultures. Participants were 86 Dutch individualist respondents and 171 Surinamese and Turkish collectivist respondents living in the Netherlands. As compared with emotions in individualist cultures, emotions in collectivist cultures (a) were more grounded in assessments of social worth and of shifts in relative social worth, (b) were to a large extent taken to reflect reality rather than the inner world of the individual, and (c) belonged to the self-other relationship rather than being confined to the subjectivity of the self.

[1]  K. Scherer,et al.  Evidence for universality and cultural variation of differential emotion response patterning. , 1994, Journal of personality and social psychology.

[2]  D. Cicchetti.  Emotion and Adaptation , 1993 .

[3]  Anna Wierzbicka,et al.  Talking about emotions : semantics, culture, and cognition , 1992 .

[4]  Catherine A. Lutz.  Unnatural Emotions: Everyday Sentiments on a Micronesian Atoll and Their Challenge to Western Theory , 1988 .

[5]  K. Fiedler,et al.  The cognitive functions of linguistic categories in describing persons: Social cognition and language. , 1988 .

[6]  J. Stainer,et al.  The Emotions , 1922, Nature.

[7]  Shinobu Kitayama,et al.  Selfways: Diversity in modes of cultural participation. , 1997 .

[8]  H. Eysenck.  Individualism and collectivism , 1996 .

[9]  Phoebe C. Ellsworth,et al.  Sense, culture, and sensibility. , 1994 .

[10]  H. Markus,et al.  Emotion and culture: Empirical studies of mutual influence. , 1994 .

[11]  B. Mesquita,et al.  Cultural variations in emotions: a review. , 1992, Psychological bulletin.

[12]  B. Mesquita,et al.  Beyond the emotional event: Six studies on the social sharing of emotion , 1991 .

[13]  H. Markus,et al.  Culture and the self: Implications for cognition, emotion, and motivation. , 1991 .

[14]  Richard A. Shweder,et al.  Culture theory : essays on mind, self, and emotion , 1986 .

[15]  Sydney Gregory,et al.  Culture's consequences: international differences in work-related values , 1982 .