Will you boost my joy or dampen it? Cultural differences in hedonic interpersonal emotion regulation in romantic relationships.

Abstract

A central tenet guiding contemporary research on emotions is that people are fundamentally motivated to feel good and avoid feeling bad. This principle translates from intrapersonal to extrinsic interpersonal emotion regulation; people not only strive to achieve the hedonic goal of managing their own emotions, but they also help others reach the same goal-the process called hedonic interpersonal emotion regulation (hedonic IER). Here, we challenge the centrality of this principle in romantic relationships by testing a hypothesis that, compared with European Americans, Asians use hedonic IER less and benefit less from their partners' use of this strategy. Findings across three studies (total N = 2,540) supported this hypothesis. First, European Americans used hedonic IER more than Asians both in positive and negative situations, and, moreover, this cultural difference was mediated by dialectical beliefs about emotions (Study 1). Second, compared with Chinese, European Americans anticipated greater relationship satisfaction in response to their partners' hedonic IER attempts in both positive and negative situations, and this effect was again mediated by dialectical emotion beliefs (Study 2). Third, compared with Asian couples, European American couples perceived that their partners used hedonic IER more in positive situations. Moreover, when European Americans perceived that their partners used hedonic IER more, they showed greater vagal withdrawal during a positive discussion (i.e., physiological reactivity linked to enhanced social sensitivity and engagement), while Asians did not show this association (Study 3). These findings highlight the critical role of sociocultural contexts in shaping IER and its relational consequences. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).