Culture has a strong influence on how people evaluate and regulate their emotions. Previous findings suggest that Easterners tend to prefer controlling their emotions more than do Westerners. However, there is still little evidence on the prevalence of cultural differences in implicit attitudes towards emotion regulation. The goal of the present study is to investigate cross-cultural differences in the implicit and explicit attitudes towards emotion regulation to help bridge this gap in the literature. The sample consisted of 61 Chinese and 54 European Americans. Emotion Regulation Implicit Association Test (ER-IAT) was used to examine the implicit attitudes towards emotion regulation. Results showed that (1) Chinese implicitly evaluated emotional expression as more negative than European Americans; (2) Similarly, Chinese explicitly valued emotional expression as less important than European Americans. Further implications are discussed.

Introduction

Emotion is the key to understanding human behavior and cognition. Previous research has found that people from different cultures prefer different regulatory strategies and have different habits with respect to emotion regulation (Butler, Lee, & Gross, 2009). In fact, some evidence suggests that culture shapes not only our emotions but also the way they are experienced and expressed (An, Ji, Marks, & Zhang, 2017). One possible explanation is that an underlying mechanism for the development of emotion regulation attitudes could be people’s socio-cultural contexts (Miyamoto & Ma, 2011). Thus, in the current study we aimed to explore cultural differences in attitudes towards emotion regulation. Attitudes towards emotion regulation have been studied as regulatory strategies people use to deal with emotional experiences. Attitudes towards emotion regulation influence people’s tendencies and their choice of emotion regulation strategies (Mauss, Evers, Wilhelm, & Gross, 2006). Besides the primarily investigated explicit attitudes, the attitudes towards emotion regulation can also be implicit. These implicit beliefs and attitudes occur without conscious awareness (Gross, 2013). Culture functions by identifying social norms, normative behaviors, and value systems that are relevant to emotions (An et al., 2017). Attitudes towards emotion regulation have been suggested to derive from individuals’ implicit social norms and regulatory goals, which may vary according to socio-cultural contexts (Miyamoto & Ma, 2011). According to the Cultural Model of Emotions (Matsumoto & Wilson, 2008), culture creates a belief and value system that calibrates emotional responses and behaviors to prevent social chaos and to maintain social order.