Reading focus
Syllabus: How Do Culture and Emotion Shape Each Other?
Separate habitual suppression, assigned suppression and measured values, then compare responsiveness, hostility and affiliation outcomes.
Why you’re reading it. Show why a regulatory strategy’s effects may depend on its social setting and why some costs can remain across settings.
A question to consider. How could a follow-up vary the meaning of concealing emotion while holding the outward behavior as similar as possible?
Why this reading
Butler and colleagues examine whether the social effects of concealing emotion vary with people’s cultural values. Combining a questionnaire with an interaction experiment helps distinguish habitual regulation from the consequences of an instruction to suppress.
Before you read
Expressive suppression means trying to inhibit outward emotional behavior. Moderation means that an association or effect varies with another variable. Cultural values were measured; suppression instructions were randomly assigned.
Read for
- Keep the questionnaire associations separate from the experiment with previously unacquainted pairs.
- Distinguish the outcomes that varied with values from costs to disclosure and affiliation that remained across the sampled values.
Consider afterwards
- What could explain why suppression affects responsiveness differently without values themselves being the cause?
- How might a conversation with a close friend differ from a brief discussion with a stranger?
Editorial context
Participants were young women recruited from the Stanford community. Their values ranged from predominantly European to more balanced Asian–European endorsement; this was not a comparison of nationally representative Asian and European populations. Some social costs of suppression remained regardless of values. The brief, film-based interaction cannot support general advice to suppress or express emotions according to cultural background, and measured moderation does not identify a causal effect of values.