Situational differences in dialectical emotions: Boundary conditions in a cultural comparison of North Americans and East Asians

Abstract

Past research generally suggests that East Asians tolerate opposing feelings or dialectical emotions more than North Americans. We tested the idea that North Americans would have fewer opposing emotions than East Asians in positive, but not in negative or mixed situations. Forty-seven European American, 40 Chinese, and 121 Japanese students reported the emotions that a protagonist of standardised positive, negative, and mixed situations would feel. Emotions were coded into three valence categories: pleasant, unpleasant, and neither-pleasant-nor-unpleasant. As predicted, cultural differences in opposing emotion associations were found in positive situations only. Moreover, East Asians reported more neither-pleasant-nor-unpleasant feelings, especially in mixed situations, possibly reflecting a deferral of valence appraisal due to expected change.

Keywords:

• Culture
• Dialectical emotions
• Pleasant and unpleasant emotions

Acknowledgements

This research was supported by a grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation to JL.

The authors want to thank Agneta Fischer, Shinbou Kitayama, Dick Nisbett, Yu Niiya, Uli Schimmack, Shaun To Lopez and an anonymous reviewer for their help and suggestions.

Notes

¹Folk psychologies that combine influences from Confucianism, Buddhism, and Daoism are common in East Asia. While these philosophical systems sometimes contradict one another, they are often combined as a practical guide to behaviour among many people. “People may act in accordance with Confucianism when they are interacting with other people, with Taoism when they are faced with the nature, and with Buddhism when they are confronted with themselves. The three great thought schools have been synthesised, reinterpreted, and applied to different realms and different living circumstances” (Lu, 2001, p. 412).

²In another study that used the same diary, East Asians thought the narrative was about the protagonist and several people, compared with European Americans, who thought that the narrative was primarily about the protagonist to the exclusion of others (Chua, Leu, & Nisbett, 2005). The saliency of the protagonist's relationships with others is likely to influence feeling judgements among East Asians; a positive event for the protagonist that negatively affects others may be factored into the protagonist's own feelings about the event.

³The first language mentioned is the first native language of the coder. For example, the Chinese–English coders were native Chinese speakers, but also fluent in English as a second language.

⁴The kappa statistic is used to test reliability when there are more than two coders. The alpha statistic is used to test reliability among two coders.

⁵Within each cultural group, we observed situational differences in the PE-UE relationship. For example, among East Asians, pleasant and unpleasant feelings in mixed situations were less negatively related than in negative situations, t(158) = − 6.44, p<.001, and more negatively related than in positive situations, t(158) = 12.00, p<.001. This was also the case among North Americans, t _{mixed-negative}(547) = − 4.71, p<.001; t _{mixed-positive}(547) = 3.63, p<.001.