Self-construal, affective valence of the encounter, and quality of social interactions: Within and cross-culture examination

ABSTRACT

In two samples, one from Greece and another from Germany, we examined relationships between self-construal, emotional experience, and the quality of social interactions. In Greece, a more collectivistic culture, the negative affect people experienced in social interactions was more weakly related to the quality of social interactions for those higher in interdependent self-construal than it was for those lower in interdependent self-construal. In Germany, a more independent culture, a contrasting pattern was observed such that the positive affect people experienced in social interaction was more strongly related to the quality of social interactions for those higher in independent self-construal than it was for those lower in independent self-construal. These findings suggest that positive and negative affect in social encounters can have different effects for persons with independent and interdependent cultural orientations within different cultural settings.

KEYWORDS:

• Culture
• emotion
• self-construal
• social interaction
• social relationships

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Data availability statement

The data described in this article are openly available in the Open Science Framework at https://osf.io/wqnnx/

Open Scholarship

This article has earned the Center for Open science badges for Open Data and Open Materials through Open Practices Disclosure. The data and materials are openly accessible at https://osf.io/wqnnx/

Notes

1. We also collected other interaction level measures that primarily concerned perceptions of how the other person(s) present in the interaction felt. These measures were not germane to our hypotheses, and we do not present or discuss them. A full description of these measures is available from the authors.

2. The full study protocol and social interaction diary questions are available at https://osf.io/wqnnx/.

3. Data are openly available and can be accessed at https://osf.io/wqnnx/.

4. The no-intercept model we used did not provide separate estimates for the variances for each country. Unconditional analyses of the measures done for each country separately did not find pronounced or meaningful differences in either the within- or between-person variances for the variables in Table 1.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Konstantinos Kafetsios

Konstantinos Kafetsios is a Professor in Social and Organizational Psychology at the University of Crete. His research interests include social and personal relationships and emotion in social interaction.

Ursula Hess

Ursula Hess is Professor of Psychology at Humboldt-University Berlin. Her research program is centered on the communication of emotions.

John B. Nezlek

John B. Nezlek is a Professor at SWPS University of Social Sciences and Humanities, Poznań and the College of William & Mary. His research interests include daily experience and applications of multilevel modeling in personality and social psychology.