Schouten, A., Boiger, M., Kirchner-Häusler, A., Uchida, Y., & Mesquita, B. (2020). Cultural differences in emotion suppression in Belgian and Japanese couples: a social functional model. Frontiers in psychology, 1048. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.01048

In Western cultures, emotion suppression has been demonstrated to have detrimental psychological and social implications. However, emotion suppression is less likely to have negative implications in some other cultures. Moreover, in the East-Asian cultures, emotion suppression is more widespread.

Conducting a dyadic conflict study, researchers intended to (a) conceptualize cultural differences found in previous research regarding the prevalence and consequences of emotion suppression, and (b) extend previous research by determining whether cultural differences are greater for some types of negative emotions than for others. Authors believed that cultural differences in suppression are less prominent for socially engaged emotions (such as guilt) than for socially disengaging emotions (such as rage), because the former promotes relationships while the latter emphasizes individual interests.

Participants in this study were Belgian (N = 58) and Japanese (N = 80) couples who engaged in a 10-minute conflict interaction followed by video-mediated memory, in which they rated their feelings and emotion suppression every 30 seconds.

Japanese participants reported higher suppression than their Belgian counterparts, as expected. The cultural differences were even more significant when participants experienced more socially disengaging feelings rather than more socially engaging emotions. These findings showed that when discussing cultural differences in emotion suppression, the types of emotions should be taken into account. Finally, emotion suppression was found to be negatively associated with interaction outcomes (i.e., conflict resolution) in Belgian couples but not in Japanese couples, confirming earlier findings.