Cultural Differences in the Implicit Attitudes towards Emotion Regulation and their Relations with Cultural Values

People desire emotions that are consistent with their value system across cultures. Cultural model determines how people evaluate and regulate their emotions. Previous cross-cultural study suggested that Chinese people prefer decreasing and controlling their emotions than their Western counterparts. However, little attention has been paid to examine cultural differences in the implicit attitudes towards emotion regulation and their relations with cultural values. In this study, Implicit Association Test (IAT) was used to assess implicit attitudes towards emotional expression and emotional control among Chinese (N = 61) and European Americans (N = 54). Also, cultural values were assessed to explore their relations with the implicit attitudes towards emotion regulation. Results showed that (1) Compared with European Americans, Chinese evaluated emotional expression as more negative implicitly; (2) Similarly, as to the explicit attitudes towards emotion regulation, Chinese valued emotional expression less important than that among European Americans; (3) The more participants advocated collectivism values the more positive they evaluated emotional suppression. These findings contribute to the growing literature by demonstrating that cultural values shape how people regulate their emotions implicitly and explicitly across cultures.