Cultural differences in the dialectical and non-dialectical emotional styles and their implications for health

Abstract

Previous cross-cultural studies have repeatedly demonstrated that East Asians are more likely to show a dialectical emotional style than Americans, but do not distinguish between specific types of dialectical emotional styles. Using an age diverse sample, we found that compared to Americans, Japanese are more likely to experience both positive and negative emotions moderately frequently (i.e., moderate dialectical), but are no more likely to experience them frequently (i.e., high dialectical). Thus, dialectical emotions prevalent in East Asia may be characterised by a “middle way” rather than by emotional extremes. Furthermore, we explored whether dialectical emotion types are associated with better health profiles depending on cultural background. Our results show that the moderate dialectical type is associated with fewer physical symptoms in Japan than in the USA. Together, these findings show the cultural differences in the experience of balanced positive and negative emotions and their health correlates.

Keywords:

• Culture
• Positive and negative emotion
• Dialectical emotion
• Health

Acknowledgements

This research was supported by two grants from the National Institute on Aging, one to conduct the MIDUS longitudinal follow-up study (P01-AG020166), and the other to conduct parallel research in Japan (R37-AG027343).

Notes

¹It is important to note that our conceptualisation of dialectical emotions is also distinct from formulations of hedonic balance (Bradburn, 1969), which is the relative preponderance of positive over negative emotions and is derived by subtracting negative emotions from positive emotions. Neither ambivalence indices nor hedonic balance distinguish between different degrees of dialectical emotions (high, moderate, or low frequency) and thus are different from our typology approach.

²Also, while Keyes included numerous measures of psychological, social, and emotional functioning in defining his typology, we focus exclusively on specific combinations of positive and negative emotions.

³In addition, females were more likely than males to report a larger number of physical symptoms, F(1, 4272) = 33.91, p<.001. There was an interaction between culture and gender, indicating that the gender difference was larger in the USA than in Japan, F(1, 4272) = 4.35, p<.05. There was no three-way interaction between gender, culture, and emotion type, F<1.