Emotions as Within or Between People? Cultural Variation in Lay Theories of Emotion Expression and Inference

Abstract

Four studies using open-ended and experimental methods test the hypothesis that in Japanese contexts, emotions are understood as between people, whereas in American contexts, emotions are understood as primarily within people. Study 1 analyzed television interviews of Olympic athletes. When asked about their relationships, Japanese athletes used significantly more emotion words than American athletes. This difference was not significant when questions asked directly about athletes' feelings. In Study 2, when describing an athlete's emotional reaction to winning, Japanese participants implicated others more often than American participants. After reading an athlete's self-description, Japanese participants inferred more emotions when the athlete mentioned relationships, whereas American participants inferred more emotions when the athlete focused only on herself (Study 3). Finally, when viewing images of athletes, Japanese participants inferred more emotions for athletes pictured with teammates, whereas American participants inferred more emotions for athletes pictured alone (Studies 4a and 4b).

The cultural construction of emotions

“…Several studies have found emotions in the United Sates to be understood as arising from the individual, but in Japan as arising from the relationships between individuals [38,39]. These differences in conceptualization are important to both experience and perception.…”

“…Japanese athletes reported more emotions when they described their relationship with others than did American athletes. Japanese respondents also perceived more emotions in athletes who were surrounded by others than did American respondents [38]. Moreover, in several emotion perception studies in which participants judged a target person's emotions [40,41], Japanese used the surrounding people's facial expressions to establish the target person's emotions, but Westerner did not.…”

Concerns Involving the Self: What Is It That You Really Worry about, Regret, or Are Anxious about, When Things Do Not Go Right for You?

“…It is very well known that many substantial cultural variations have been identified between independent (e.g., Euro-American) and interdependent(e.g., Asian) cultures (Uchida et al, 2004;Uchida et al, 2008;Uchida et al, 2009); however, the present study has obtained the same inner latent factor in countries representing such different cultures. Can the same latent inner factor be extracted from the combined data of US and Japanese respondents?…”

Linguistic Representation of Emotions in Japanese and Hungarian: Quantity and Abstractness

“…In cross-cultural psychology, several authors describe a specific range of emotions, more accessible than others to Japanese (Doi, 1981;Morschbach & Tyler, 1986;Markus & Kitayama, 1991;Kitayama, Mesquita, Karasawa, 2006). Other studies discuss the Japanese cultural scripts, which guide the order of expressing and understanding emotions (Wierzbicka, 1996), emotion inference (Uchida et al, 2009) and co-occurrence of positive and negative emotions in Japan (Miyamoto, Uchida, Ellsworth, 2010;Uchida & Kitayama, 2009). …”