ABSTRACT
Culture influences how people cope with interpersonal tensions, with those from more collectivistic contexts (e.g. Chinese Americans (CA)) generally opting for strategies promoting social harmony whereas those from more individualistic contexts (e.g. European Americans (EA)) preferring confrontational strategies. The current study examined cultural differences in coping strategy choices and their linkages to immediate affective reactions and subsequent affective memories. Participants (N = 159) discussed hypothetical dilemmas with a disagreeable confederate matched by age group, gender, and cultural group. CA exhibited less positive affect reactivity (i.e. smaller decreases in positive affect) and greater positive affect recovery (i.e. greater increases in post-task positive affect) compared to EA, which was explained by CAs’ appraisals of greater emotional support from the confederate and lower endorsement of defending one’s opinions. In contrast, one week later, EA, but not CA, recalled experiencing more task positive affect and less task negative affect than originally reported. Cultural differences in negative affect memory discrepancies were explained by EAs’ greater tendency to defend their opinions, relative to CA. Culture shapes coping choices, which predict affective consequences over different time scales.
Acknowledgements
We thank Jeanne Tsai, Tamara Sims, Birgit Koopmann-Holm, Louise Chim, Michael Boiger, and Adina Dumitrache for their helpful feedback on previous versions of this manuscript.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Data availability and open practices statement
The study reported in this article was not formally pre-registered. Neither the data nor the materials have been made available on a permanent third-party archive; requests for the data or materials can be sent via email to the lead author at [email protected].