Health Implications of Pro-Positive versus Balanced Systems of Emotions across Cultures

People generally consider positive emotions more favorably than negative emotions, want to increase positive emotions and decrease negative emotions, and experience positive emotions more than negative emotions. However, growing evidence suggests that the extent to which people hold such a pro-positive system of emotion differs across cultures; whereas a pro-positive system of emotion is prevalent in American cultural contexts, a more balanced system of emotion exists in East Asian cultural contexts. In this talk, we will present our research that examines health implications of cultural variations in emotion systems. Positive emotions are more likely to be associated with better health in the U.S. where a pro-positive system of emotions is dominant, than in Japan where a more balanced system of emotion exists. The analyses of representative samples show that positive emotion are associated with a healthier lipids profile (lower Total/HDL ratio) in the U.S., but not in Japan. It is thus possible that health implications of emotions are rooted partly in a system of emotions prevalent in the given cultural context. We will discuss the benefit of examining emotions as a system and comparing the systems and their health implications between two cultures. The importance of examining proximal and distal cultural contexts that support given emotion systems and their functioning will also be discussed. We will end by discussing how these findings will contribute to the identification of not only cultural differences in the emotion-health link but also potential cultural similarities in the role cultural beliefs play in psycho-biological functioning.