Caption

Is bottling up your emotions always bad for you? We hear this advice constantly: don’t suppress your emotions. Open up. Say how you feel. Holding everything in will eventually hurt you. And there’s plenty of research linking expressive suppression with poorer psychological outcomes. But cross-cultural psychology makes the story much more complicated. In one study, researchers compared European American participants with Hong Kong Chinese participants and examined how habitual emotional suppression related to life satisfaction and depressed mood. Among the European American participants, the pattern looked pretty much like you might expect: greater suppression was associated with poorer psychological functioning. But among the Hong Kong Chinese participants, that negative relationship wasn’t found. Why might the same emotion-regulation strategy relate to well-being differently across cultures? One possibility is that suppressing an emotion doesn’t necessarily mean the same thing everywhere. In cultural contexts where openly expressing your internal feelings is closely connected with authenticity and individuality, holding those feelings back may conflict with how people believe they’re supposed to relate to others. But in contexts where greater emphasis is placed on interdependence, adjusting to other people, and maintaining social harmony, regulating what you outwardly express can serve a different interpersonal function. And newer research continues to complicate the idea that suppression is universally unhealthy. Studies have found that the negative relationship between suppression and mental health is sometimes weaker or absent in East Asian cultural contexts. Under certain circumstances, particular forms of emotional restraint have even been associated with better outcomes. That does NOT mean suppressing your emotions is always healthy in East Asian cultures or unhealthy in Western ones. Culture doesn’t determine how every individual regulates emotion, and the effects of suppression can depend on the situation, the emotion being suppressed, why someone is suppressing it, and their own cultural values. But it does challenge a bigger assumption: that there is one universally healthy way to express emotion. That matters in the workplace, too. If you’re coaching someone and automatically tell them, “You need to open up more” or “Just say how you feel,” you may be giving advice based partly on your own cultural model of healthy communication. Sometimes understanding another person means asking not only what they’re feeling, but what expressing—or not expressing—that feeling means to them. Have you noticed cultural differences in how people around you express emotion? #psychologyfacts #emotionalintelligence #Cultural #hongkong #culturaldifferences