People conform to emotion norms more in individualist than collectivist cultures

People who live in collectivist cultures, which emphasise the importance of the group over the individual, are more likely to conform to culturally acceptable forms of behaviour than people who live in individualistic countries, such as the US and UK. Indeed, it's generally assumed that the following of social norms is a central feature of life in a collectivist country, such as China and Singapore, write Allon Vishkin at the Israel Institute of Technology and colleagues in a new paper in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology: Interpersonal Relations and Group Processes.

However, the team now reports a striking exception to this: people who live in individualistic nations stick closer to their culture's emotion norms. These are the types of emotions that are generally viewed as being most acceptable and desirable within that culture.

This finding is based on the results of four studies that looked for links between levels of individualism and adherence to emotional norms across different cultures.  Each of the studies had a different strength. The first considered a huge number of emotions (60), the second featured samples from a massive 48 different countries, the third had the largest number of participants (97,000), and the fourth was on children aged 10 – 12 from 33 countries.

Though there were some discrepancies in the findings from the different studies, the team also reports some consistent patterns. The main one was that there was more 'emotional homogeneity' in individualistic compared with collectivist countries. This essentially meant that in individualistic countries, people's emotions were more similar to those of their compatriots. This was true for 'valued emotions' (the types of emotions that participants said they would like to feel; found in studies 1 and 2) and for the emotions that people reported actually experiencing (in studies 2, 3 and 4). The team reports that adherence to emotion norms was also linked to greater emotional wellbeing, especially in individualistic nations.

"Overall, these findings converge to indicate that adherence to emotion norms is greater, and more consequential to wellbeing, in more individualistic cultures," the researchers write. It's also notable that they found evidence of this even in children.

Why should people in individualistic countries show greater emotional conformity?

While emotions are considered expressions of the 'authentic self' in both types of culture, individualistic cultures place greater emphasis on this type of authenticity, the team writes. And "the more weight is attributed to individual emotional experiences, the greater the pressure may be to conform to socially desirable ones." A highly individualistic country like the US, for example, places a lot of emphasis on individual experiences, and highly values the emotion of 'happiness'. This could lead to greater pressure to 'be' happy in the US than in a country that gives less weight to individual emotional experiences.

Also, people in more individualistic cultures are just more likely to express their emotions in everyday interactions, the team writes — and this could intensify the pressure to conform to social norms about how to feel.

People living in collectivist cultures are generally not going to conform to emotional norms to the same extent as people living in individualistic cultures, the team writes. But they also point out that those exact norms aren't going to be the same in every collectivist (or individualistic) culture. For example, people from collectivist nations in east Asia tend to value calm positive emotions, but research shows that those from Mexico – another collectivist culture – place more emphasis on "high-arousal" positive feelings like excitement (this is more similar to the values of individualistic countries like the US). "There could be meaningful variation in adherence to emotion norms among collectivist cultures," the team writes. This will be something for future research to explore.