Defending honour, keeping face: Interpersonal affordances of anger and shame in Turkey and Japan

Abstract

In the present study, we tested the idea that emotions are afforded to the extent that they benefit central cultural concerns. We predicted that emotions that are beneficial for the Turkish concern for defending honour (both anger and shame) are afforded frequently in Turkey, whereas emotions that are beneficial for the Japanese concern for keeping face (shame but not anger) are afforded frequently in Japan. N = 563 students from Turkey and Japan indicated how frequently people in their culture experience a range of interpersonal anger and shame situations, and how intense their emotions would be. As predicted, participants perceived emotional interactions to occur frequently to the extent that they elicited culturally beneficial emotions. Moreover, the affordance of culturally beneficial emotions differed in predictable ways not only between cultures but also within cultures between situations with close vs. distant others and male vs. female protagonists.

Keywords:

• Culture
• Affordances
• Anger
• Shame
• Honour
• Face

We thank Philippe Verduyn for his help in programming the preliminary daily diary study and three anonymous reviewers for their thoughtful and encouraging remarks.

This research was supported by a grant from the Research Council of the University of Leuven.

We thank Philippe Verduyn for his help in programming the preliminary daily diary study and three anonymous reviewers for their thoughtful and encouraging remarks.

This research was supported by a grant from the Research Council of the University of Leuven.

Supplementary material

Supplementary content is available via the ‘Supplementary’ tab on the article's online page (http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02699931.2014.881324).

Notes

¹ We conceive of emotion promotion and avoidance as culture-level rather than individual-level processes. For example, when speaking of an emotion as being “promoted” in a culture, we propose that people in this culture encounter many opportunities to experience this emotion during interactions with others; this form of cultural “up-regulation” involves the concerted, culturally shaped interplay of multiple agents. Our use of these terms is thus not to be confused with individual tendencies to actively seek out or avoid certain emotions or emotional situations.

² When looking at each consensus analysis separately, there were two exceptions to the overall pattern of agreement: Turkish participants did not strongly agree on how frequently shame situations occur in their culture (ratio = 1.68) and showed only tendential agreement on how frequently anger situations occur (ratio = 2.66).