Cultural Differences in Perceptual Strategies Underlying Emotion Regulation

Cultural norms for the experience, expression, and regulation of emotion vary widely between individualistic and collectivistic cultures. Collectivistic cultures value conformity, social harmony, and social status hierarchies, which demand sensitivity and focus to broader social contexts, such that attention is directed to contextual emotion information to effectively function within constrained social roles and suppress incongruent personal emotions. By contrast, individualistic cultures valuing autonomy and personal aspirations are more likely to attend to central emotion information and to reappraise emotions to avoid negative emotional experience. Here we examined how culture affects perceptual strategies employed during emotion regulation, particularly during cognitive reappraisal and emotional suppression. Eye movements were measured while healthy young adult participants viewed negative International Affective Picture System (IAPS) images and regulated emotions by using either strategies of reappraisal (19 Asian American, 21 Caucasian American) or suppression (21 Asian American, 23 Caucasian American). After image viewing, participants rated how negative they felt as a measure of subjective emotional experience. Consistent with prior studies, reappraisers made lower negative valence ratings after regulating emotions than suppressers across both Asian American and Caucasian American groups. Although no cultural variation was observed in subjective emotional experience during emotion regulation, we found evidence of cultural variation in perceptual strategies used during emotion regulation. During middle and late time periods of emotional suppression, Asian American participants made significantly fewer fixations to emotionally salient areas than Caucasian American participants. These results indicate cultural variation in perceptual differences underlying emotional suppression, but not cognitive reappraisal.