Emotions Across Cultures and Methods

Abstract

Participants included 46 European American, 33 Asian American, 91 Japanese, 160 Indian, and 80 Hispanic students ( N = 416). Discrete emotions, as well as pleasant and unpleasant emotions, were assessed: (a) with global self-report measures, (b) using an experience-sampling method for 1 week, and (c) by asking participants to recall their emotions from the experience sampling week. Cultural differences emerged for nearly all measures. The inclusion of indigenous emotions in India and Japan did not alter the conclusions substantially, although pride showed a pattern across cultures that differed from the other positive emotions. In all five culturalgroupsandforbothpleasantandunpleasantemotions,globalreportsof emotionpredictedretrospective recall even after controllingforreportsmadeduringthe experiencesamplingperiod,suggestingthat individuals’ general conceptions of their emotional lives influenced their memories of emotions. Cultural differences emerged in the degree to which recall of frequency of emotion was related to experience sampling reports of intensity of emotions. Despite the memory bias, the three methods led to similar conclusions about the relative position of the groups.