Antecedent-focused regulation: a source of cross-cultural differences in emotion.

Emotions that fit cultural goals tend to be frequent, whereas emotions that these goals are more likely rare. This correspondence between cultural goals or values and emotion prevalence suggests that emotion regulation is involved. Cross-cultural research has focused on regulation after the fact (response-focused regulation), assuming that people across cultures experience the same emotions but regulate them. Howeer, the prevalence findings suggest that much regulation takes place at the front end of the emotion process (antecedent emotion regulation), and that people across cultures thus tend to have different emotional experiences to begin with. The central objective of this research is to provide evidence that people tend to selectively appraise situations in ways that fit their framework of cultural meanings and goals. In two cross-cultural experimental studies, we will test the model that (a) emotion regulation is goal-driven, (b) inter- and independence goals influence how people appraise situations, which, as a form of antecedent emotion regulation, in turn influences the content of what people feel and how they behave, (c) the salience of the relevant inter- and independence goals systematically varies across cultures, and (d) priming these goals affects emotion regulation.

Keywords:Emotion regulation, Culture, Goals, Bi-culturalism