Convergence in feeling, divergence in physiology: How culture influences the consequences of disgust suppression and amplification among European Americans and Asian Americans
Document Type
Article
Department or Administrative Unit
Psychology
Publication Date
12-17-2015
Abstract
Much empirical work documents the downsides of suppressing emotions. Emerging research points to the need for a more sophisticated and culturally informed approach to understanding the consequences of emotion regulation. To that end, we employed behavioral, self‐report, and psychophysiological measures to examine the consequences of two types of emotion regulation (suppression and amplification) in a sample of 28 Asian Americans and 31 European Americans. Participants were shown a neutral film and then a series of disgust‐eliciting films during which they were asked to regulate their response by suppressing or amplifying their emotional behavior (counterbalanced). Despite self‐reporting equal levels of disgust, European Americans showed greater skin conductance reactivity than Asian Americans in both regulation conditions, but not in response to a neutral film. These findings extend work on divergence in the consequences of emotion regulation across different cultural groups, which could help identify optimal emotion regulation strategies for health and well‐being.
Recommended Citation
Soto, J. A., Lee, E. A., & Roberts, N. A. (2015). Convergence in feeling, divergence in physiology: How culture influences the consequences of disgust suppression and amplification among European Americans and Asian Americans. Psychophysiology, 53(1), 41–51. https://doi.org/10.1111/psyp.12579
Journal
Psychophysiology
Rights
Copyright © 2015 Society for Psychophysiological Research
Comments
This article was originally published in Psychophysiology. The full-text article from the publisher can be found here.
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