Proud Americans and lucky Japanese: Cultural differences in appraisal and corresponding emotion.

Abstract

Appraisal theories of emotion propose that the emotions people experience correspond to their appraisals of their situation. In other words, individual differences in emotional experiences reflect differing interpretations of the situation. We hypothesized that in similar situations, people in individualist and collectivist cultures experience different emotions because of culturally divergent causal attributions for success and failure (i.e., agency appraisals). In a test of this hypothesis, American and Japanese participants recalled a personal experience (Study 1) or imagined themselves to be in a situation (Study 2) in which they succeeded or failed, and then reported their agency appraisals and emotions. Supporting our hypothesis, cultural differences in emotions corresponded to differences in attributions. For example, in success situations, Americans reported stronger self-agency emotions (e.g., proud) than did Japanese, whereas Japanese reported a stronger situation-agency emotion (lucky). Also, cultural differences in attribution and emotion were largely explained by differences in self-enhancing motivation. When Japanese and Americans were induced to make the same attribution (Study 2), cultural differences in emotions became either nonsignificant or were markedly reduced.

Cross-cultural decoding of positive and negative non-linguistic emotion vocalizations

“…Guilt, pride, and shame involve reflection upon and evaluation of the self (Tangney and Tracy, 2012), which makes these emotions more dependent on complex cognitive skills compared to basic emotions. Cultures vary regarding how the self is conceptualized (Markus and Kitayama, 1991), and this may lead to culture-specific interpretations of situations particularly relevant for self-conscious emotions such pride and shame (Imada and Ellsworth, 2011). There is thus a possibility that cultural variance may be especially salient for expressions of self-conscious emotions.…”

Cultural regulation of emotion: individual, relational, and structural sources

“…European Americans have a pervasive tendency to attribute success to themselves, and failure to others or the situation; the opposite is true for East Asians (e.g., Heine et al, 1999). A recent study tested the idea that cultural differences in the appraisal of causal agency are associated with different emotional experiences (Imada and Ellsworth, 2011). Japanese and European American college students were asked to remember success and failure situations, to indicate if these situations had been caused by themselves, others, or circumstances, and to rate the intensity of their feelings.…”

Positive cross-cultural psychology: Exploring similarity and difference in constructions and experiences of wellbeing

“…Crucially, Oishi (2010) suggests that they do not: whereas Western conceptions of happiness pertain essentially to a positive emotional state, in the East, happiness is taken as referring more to fortune and luck. This may be due to various interrelated reasons, including more 'fatalistic' cultural expectations (Shaw, 2011), deterministic philosophies derived from Hinduism and Buddhism, like the notion of karma (Guang, 2013), and greater self-effacement, leading people to attribute success to external factors (Imada & Ellsworth, 2011). Moreover, even if happiness is defined similarly across cultures, there may be further methodological issues relating to variation in how it is reported; e.g., whereas people in individualist cultures may be encouraged to assert and celebrate individual achievements, those in collectivist cultures may feel pressure to be self-effacing (Du & Jonas, 2015).…”