Music is often used to "soothe the soul," and one important function of music listening has been emotion regulation. In comparing consumption trends across cultures, past research has shown that individuals in Western countries, with typically higher prevalence of high arousal negative emotions, tend to listen to similarly high arousal rhythmic (danceable) music to cathartically discharge those emotions. However, other studies have shown that Spotify's energy feature, a measure of the intensity-based arousal of a song, indicates the opposite effect: Energy was higher in songs in East Asian top-50 charts than in Western ones.Combining evidence from reanalyses of secondary data (Pilot Analyses 1 and 2), sentiment analyses of lyrics from the US and Singapore (Study 1; N = 87 songs), and an emotion induction experiment in Japan and the US (Study 2; N = 353 participants), we show that collectivistic, East Asian cultures generally prefer songs with higher energy levels, and energetic songs are robustly associated with anger downregulation, over sadness and anxiety downregulation. We speculate that energy, as an intensity-based musical arousal feature, may represent internalizing (control) regulation that one uses to "drown out" anger, which would be more prevalent in East Asian cultures due to sociocultural norms of emotion (non)expression.Conversely, this would be different from the externalizing regulation associated with rhythm-based musical arousal (i.e., danceability). | INTRODUCTIONCultures differ in the music they consume. A recent large-scale analysis of music listening patterns and preferences from 1 million Spotify users found divergent trends in music listening in regions around the world (Park, Thom, et al., 2019). For example, music listened to in East Asian countries tended to be lower arousal than music from Latin America or the West. Considering that human perception of music is largely universal (see Savage et al., 2015), these cultural differences in patterns of music consumption may be more a reflection of cultural differences in music preference and less of a biological or physiological difference in auditory sensation and perception towards music.Accordingly, since perception is largely universal, why do certain cultures prefer some types of music over others? Park, Kitayama, et al. (2019) andPark, Thom, et al.'s (2019) findings on arousal hint at one important aspect in answering this question. One of the primary, functional reasons that people listen to music is to affect regulation (Cook et al., 2019;Groarke & Hogan, 2018), particularly the downregulation of negative emotions (Sharman & Dingle, 2015).However, affective norms are highly sensitive to cultural influences
With the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, companies around the world have been introducing telework. However, Japan stands out for its low rate of telework implementation, and it seems there may be cultural factors that have hindered telework use in Japan during the pandemic. In this study, we aim to clarify the antecedents and consequences of telework in Japan, making use of the natural experiment created by the COVID-19 pandemic to examine the following two questions: (1) What socio-psychological factors in workplaces were important for introducing telework in the first place? and (2) How did the implementation of telework subsequently influence socio-psychological factors in these workplaces? Three waves of an online survey were conducted among the same employees working for Japanese companies before and during the pandemic. We found that telework in Japan was more readily introduced in organizations characterized by meritocracy. We also found that the introduction of telework in Japanese companies did not have any negative effects but instead increased levels of independence, organizational commitment and perceived hierarchy mutability. We discuss how telework interacts with culture at both societal and organizational levels.
Studies of person-organization fit (P-O fit) have shown that a fit between the values of the individual and organizational culture leads to higher employee well-being (e.g., high job satisfaction). However, it is not entirely clear what organizational culture forms a favorable P-O fit with highly interdependent employees. Thus, the current study examines the type of organizational culture that forms an effective P-O fit with employees with highly interdependent cultural values in the East Asian context.A longitudinal survey of 456 workers in Japan conducted in 2021 and 2022 revealed that clan culture—organizational culture emphasizing interpersonal harmony—was positively related to employee well-being, and the effects became stronger when they had high levels of interdependence. Conversely, market culture—organizational culture emphasizing competition and achievement—was unrelated to well-being. Furthermore, it related negatively to employee well-being when interdependence was high. These results suggest that organizational culture’s effects on employee well-being vary when individuals have interdependent values.
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