CULTURAL EFFECTS ON EMOTION
Josey Camerer
Missouri Southern State University
CULTURAL EMOTION
When considering emotion, most people would assume that it is completely universal. I
have chosen three articles that take a deeper look into emotion and the way it is portrayed
throughout different cultures. The three articles I have critiqued consider various factors about
emotions in different cultures by looking at age ranges, gender, discrimination in race and
factored them in to how the different cultures meet milestones and how and when they begin to
express specific emotions and why. I will begin by critiquing the three articles I have chosen
which are Emotion Regulation from Early Adolescence to Emerging Adulthood and Middle
Adulthood: Age Differences, Gender Differences, and Emotion Specific Developmental
Variations, Culture Effects in Emotion and Gender Recognition, and Social Role Effects on
Gender Stereotyping in Germany and Japan, next I will choose my favorite article and
specifically identify why, lastly, I will provide a real life example and apply it to my favorite of
the three articles.
Emotion Regulation from Early Adolescence to Emerging Adulthood and Middle
Adulthood: Age Differences, Gender Differences, and Emotion Specific Developmental
Variations begins by explaining their study on early adolescence to emerging adulthood based on
many different variables and how they relate to certain life milestones. These milestones include:
long-term goal making, recognizing and understanding personal feelings and the feelings of
others, understanding different perceptions and evaluations, understanding emotion related
behaviors as a part of the emotional process, self-regulation, hormones, self-control, neuroticism,
and even depression. For example, during emerging adulthood, a person’s self-regulation will
become more responsive while the social or external regulation becomes less responsive.
This research also identifies one commonality among other studies, which is that in the
adolescence stage there is no determined pattern in emotional development that remains
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constant. Emotion Regulation from Early Adolescence to Emerging Adulthood and Middle
Adulthood: Age Differences, Gender Differences, and Emotion Specific Developmental
Variations points out that early on, in the journal article, they have taken a different approach to
the age grouping in their study. This study also adds the variable of gender differences to be even
more accurate in their findings.
The study begins the actual research with four main objectives. Next, the participants
were chosen and consisted of 1305 low risk, white, Germans, 52% of which were female. The
measures used included the Negative Emotion Regulation Inventory (NERI) which is a selfanswered questionnaire. After, the different strategies were reported, they were able to determine
the various results. After the results were concluded, they tested age changes in each of the seven
emotion regulation strategies for each of the three emotions of sadness, fear, and anger.
The seven emotion regulation strategies are: Adaptive emotion regulation, social support
seeking, passivity, avoidance, expressive suppression, dysfunctional rumination, and
dysregulation. Sadness, fear, and anger were applied separately to each of the seven regulation
strategies using a MANOVA equation. Following the final study results, this article includes a
discussion of the results by breaking them down into several categories. Developmental trends in
strategy use, emotion effects on emotion regulation, general or emotion-specific development of
emotion regulation, and the growth and decline of emotion regulation during adolescence and
adulthood were all very important topics included in the end discussion.
When a Chinese native sees an American native, all of the faces may appear to look the
same to the Chinese native. When an American native looks at several Chinese natives, all of the
faces may appear to be similar. However, when a Chinese native looks at someone of the same
race, they are able to see distinguishing features to make each face look vastly different and
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unique. The same concept of features would also apply to an American native seeing someone of
their own race as well. Culture Effects in Emotion and Gender Recognition explores how facial
identity and emotion among different race’s is viewed and discriminated within different
cultures. The main topic of this article is how descendants from different racial backgrounds in
different culture’s view and observe things around them. Culture Effects in Emotion and Gender
Recognition theorizes that how we view things differently correlates with motivation related
constructs. Another theory asked if emotion discriminated the same type of way in different
cultures.
The article provides two different experiments to their study. Condition one is High
Saliency Emotion consisting of 32 post-graduates between the ages of 20 and 22. Half of the
participants for this study were female and the other half were male. Everyone participating in
the study had normal vision, was right hand dominant, and had never been involved in a similar
study. The groups first purpose was to rate the emotional expression of two sets of photos of
people with different racial backgrounds including a white person and Asian person. Participants
were told that this study was related to reaction time and that they were to label either the
emotion or gender. Condition two was Low Saliency Emotion. The particiants, design, and
procedure were the same in this experiment, however, the materials and displays were slightly
altered. The study then provided several charts and graphs with explanation in accordance with
their research. In the discussion, it was established that people were quicker to react to gender as
opposed to emotion. Next, they discussed cultural differences in face categorization where they
did establish that different cultures how different determination points for emotion.
This journal article was very detail oriented, organized and well laid out for its readers.
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Adults are constantly studying children in their candid everyday lives, and when they do this,
they speculate about how the children do things and why they may do them because they are a
boy’s being boys, or girls being girls. Blaming a certain behaviors on their sexual orientation
provokes gender stereotyping in children as they grow into adults. Social Role Effects on Gender
Stereotyping in Germany and Japan looks at how different cultures shape and incite gender
stereotyping there is first evidence formed from an experiment originally by Eagly and Steffen.
This experiment studied men and women performing the same task. While performing the tasks,
the men and women both performed equally in both the masculine and feminine roles, which
proved to disregard gender stereotyping.
The next part of the article discusses communion, which is a feminine trait, and agency,
which is a masculine trait. Communion and agency are paired in relation to interdependent and
independent self-construal. Independent self-construal means a person basically thinks for
themselves and what they want. Interdependent self-construal means the person becomes who
they are “supposed” to be based off of an outside source, such as the community, religion, or
expectations of others. These four terms are paired differently for each particular culture and
country.
For the study, target sex, role, and culture was the design with ascribed agency and
communion as the dependent variables. The participants were made up of 144 German 144
Japanese students that were half female and the other half male. Each participant was randomly
assigned a task and filled out a questionnaire. The end of the article provided charts, graphs and
results in essay format that was concluded with a discussion. Overall, this study was very well
designed, and followed exemplary procedures for the research. It did included the necessary
dependent variables and followed a standardized method.
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Out of the three articles, my favorite article was Emotion Regulation from Early
Adolescence to Emerging Adulthood and Middle Adulthood: Age Differences, Gender
Differences, and Emotion Specific Developmental Variations. This is the article I have chosen to
further critique and apply to a real life example. Most articles or research that have done on
emotion regulation do not include the entire life span. The research on emotion regulation
usually consist of either infancy and childhood or adulthood. Emotion Regulation from Early
Adolescence to Emerging Adulthood and Middle Adulthood: Age Differences, Gender
Differences, and Emotion Specific Developmental Variations goes in depth with their research
covering infancy, childhood, adolescence, emerging adulthood, and middle adulthood. For that
reason, I chose this article. I like that they were trying to be different and throw the research in
an advanced in depth direction.
The four aims of the study were to look at the normative age changes between from early
adolescence to middle adulthood, assess and compare both the general and emotion specific use
of the several emotion regulation strategies, research whether gender differences in emotion
regulation can be found in larger age groups, and lastly test the hypothesis that the repertoire of
emotion regulation strategies is changing with growing age. The results were were listed in many
forms from essay form listed in several different subject areas to several graphs in each subject
area. The overall conclusion stated there is danger of flawed estimate of the development of
emotion regulation during adolescence and emerging adulthood when it is not assessed emotion
specific. This article is very innovative and gives a fresh perspective on emotion regulation
through the life span of either male or female.
Emotion Regulation from Early Adolescence to Emerging Adulthood and Middle
Adulthood: Age Differences, Gender Differences, and Emotion Specific Developmental
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Variations will now be applied to a real life example. Most people in early adolescence age time
line are going through a major conflictual stage with their parents that is considered “going
through a phase” or “teenagers being teenagers.” This is also a phase characterized by emotional
insecurity in terms of role status and challenging developmental tasks or even depression. These
changes could be caused by internal hormones or puberty. However, this could also be due to
developing new emotion regulation changes. This is a perfect example of what this research is
trying to figure out.
The previous studies have discussed, in depth, how emotions can be different in different
cultures and why. They covered why men and women portray emotion differently, how the way
we view things can change the type of emotion we see in people from different cultures, and
lastly how a person’s age in different cultures can affect when they reach certain emotion
milestones. I have critiqued the three articles that I chose which were Emotion Regulation from
Early Adolescence to Emerging Adulthood and Middle Adulthood: Age Differences, Gender
Differences, and Emotion Specific Developmental Variations, Culture Effects in Emotion and
Gender Recognition, and Social Role Effects on Gender Stereotyping in Germany and Japan,
and chose my favorite article and specifically identified why I chose it, and lastly, I provided a
real life example and applied it to my favorite of the three articles.
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REFERENCES
Steinmetz, J., Bosak, J., Sczesny, S., & Eagly, A. H. (2014) Social Role Effects on
Gender Stereotyping in Germany and Japan. Asian Journal of Social Psychology.
Zimmerman, P., Iwanski, A. (23 Jan. 2014) Emotion Regulation from Early Adolescence
to Emerging Adulthood and Middle Adulthood: Age Differences, Gender Differences, and
Emotion Specific Developmental Variations. International Journal of Behavioral Development.
Gul, A. Humphreys, G.W. (2014) Culture Effects in Emotion and Gender Recognition.
International Journal of Behavioral Development.
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