Cultural and gender differences in emotion regulation: Relation to depression

Abstract

In the last decade, studies have shown that the use of specific emotion regulation strategies contributes to an increased risk for depression. Past research, however, has overlooked potential cultural and gender differences in emotion regulation. The present study examined the relation between the use of emotion regulation strategies and depressive symptoms among college students in two different cultures (n=380 in Seoul, Korea; n=384 in Miami, USA). Koreans, compared with American students, reported more frequent use of brooding, whereas Americans reported more anger suppression than Koreans. Women were more likely than men to use both types of rumination (i.e., reflective pondering and brooding) and anger suppression in both countries, but these gender differences disappeared once levels of depressive symptoms were controlled for. In addition, the association between the use of reappraisal and depressive symptoms was significantly stronger in the Korean compared to the US sample. In contrast, the association between anger suppression and depressive symptoms was significantly stronger in the American compared to the Korean sample. These findings highlight the importance of considering the role of culture in emotion regulation.

Keywords:

• Depression
• Rumination
• Reappraisal
• Emotion regulation
• Culture

Acknowledgments

This research was supported in part by Korea Research Foundation grant B00051 awarded to HK.

Notes

¹The removal of problematic items with poor psychometric properties or cross-cultural equivalence improves the measurement invariance at the expense of comprehensiveness. In effect, problematic but potentially important items could be excluded. We thus re-ran all major analyses including the two problematic items and obtained the same pattern of results.