Cultural affordances and emotional experience: Socially engaging and disengaging emotions in Japan and the United States.
2006/01/01 by Shinobu Kitayama, Batja Mesquita, Mayumi Karasawa · 922 citations
Psychology · Social Sciences · #Affordance #Anger #Cognitive psychology #Cultural Differences and Values #Developmental psychology #Emotions and Moral Behavior #Feeling #International Student and Expatriate Challenges #Pride #Psychology #Shame #Social psychology
paper · doi:10.1037/0022-3514.91.5.890
published in Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 91(5), 890-903 (American Psychological Association)
openalex publication_date 2006/01/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Abstract
The authors hypothesized that whereas Japanese culture encourages socially engaging emotions (e.g., friendly feelings and guilt), North American culture fosters socially disengaging emotions (e.g., pride and anger). In two cross-cultural studies, the authors measured engaging and disengaging emotions repeatedly over different social situations and found support for this hypothesis. As predicted, Japanese showed a pervasive tendency to reportedly experience engaging emotions more strongly than they experienced disengaging emotions, but Americans showed a reversed tendency. Moreover, as also predicted, Japanese subjective well-being (i.e., the experience of general positive feelings) was more closely associated with the experience of engaging positive emotions than with that of disengaging emotions. Americans tended to show the reversed pattern. The established cultural differences in the patterns of emotion suggest the consistent and systematic cultural shaping of emotion over time.
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