Sociocultural factors predicting subjective experience of emotion: a collective level analysis1

correlated self-ratings of emotion with the nations’ socio-economic and cultural characteristics. In spite of the complexities and difficulties involved in differentiating culture from social structure, we will try to test the competing effects of social structure (i.e. socio-economic development) and culture (i.e. value’s syndrome) on emotional experience. The value of predicting cross-national differences in emotional experience from socioeconomic factors and from Hofstede’s dimensions of national culture will be examined using data collected in six studies (in 26, 27, 26, 33, 42 and 29 nations). Nations will be treated as units and national mean scores on the subjective experience of emotion will be correlated with sociocultural variables. Following the holocultural tradition, cultures will be treated as units, and the collective scores of the variables are related to one another (Bond, 1991; Schlegel, 1994).