Differences between cultures in emotional verbal and non-verbal reactions1

to emotions are supposed to be important for both emotional research and cultural psychology. Research over the past two decades shows that culture has an important influence in experiencing, expressing and labeling emotions. If we ask ourselves why does this happen?, then we must answer very relevant questions concerning culture, as for example the meaning of culture, or which are the most important variables used to describe culture. Sometimes researchers choose a very simple and pragmatic way to solve the problem of defining culture: culture is country. But as Matsumoto (1993) suggests this option is justified only if the between-country variance is significantly greater than the within country variance. This means that people in each country are relatively homogeneous, but usually we do not have available data to support these assumptions. Matsumoto (1993) found differences in emotion judgements, display rules, and self-reported emotional expressions as a function of ethnicity within an American sample. If we have to use country as predictor variable and we do not have data about differences within countries, a good alternative is to use some descriptive cultural indexes in order to explain differences. Following this alternative we chose three prototypical emotions (joy, anger and sadness) and collected data about verbal and non-verbal emotional reactions. We were interested in knowing not only if there were different emotional behaviours in different countries but also why these differences appeared. Some of the classical variables in cultural research (Hofstede, 1983) may help us: individualism-collectivism; femininity-masculinity; power distance, uncertainty avoidance. These dimensions, and others such as the Human Development Index, could offer some answers to our questions. For instance if people in a collective country express less emotion than in an individualistic country we may suggest that people who are worried about social harmony reduce more their negative emotional expression. Verbal and non-verbal emotional reactions were chosen because both express emotional communication in some way. Emotion is not an internal and private phenomena, it is a spice-social product in which personal and social factors are present from the beginning to the end (Frijda, 1986; Russell & Fernandez-Dols, 1997). It is currently accepted that emotions change within and between subjects, and that the cultural context plays an important role in it. Culture could be determining internal (e.g. appraisals) and external (e.g. display rules) emotional reactions. Differences between cultures in emotional verbal and non-verbal reactions1