The use of emotion regulation strategies and the related neural activation patterns are influenced by culture
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Full Text E-thesis
Date
2025-06-30
Authors
Song, Hongru
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Publisher
University College Cork
Published Version
Abstract
Emotion regulation is a rapidly growing field in psychology, and culture has been shown to play a non-negligible role in emotion regulation processes. Despite the attention given to comparisons between Western countries and East-Asian countries in this field, some emotion regulation strategies remain understudied. Through a series of large cross-cultural empirical studies, this thesis aims to understand how culture (specifically Western culture vs. East-Asian culture) shapes emotion regulation in regard to strategy use frequency, behavioural consequences, and neural activation patterns. As the first step, I conducted a systematic review and meta-analysis (Chapter Two) that synthesized cross-cultural comparison studies on the most common emotion regulation strategies studied to date. This synthesis of evidence 1) indicated greater spontaneous use of suppression and avoidance in East-Asian adults compared to Western adults, and no cultural difference in the use frequency of reappraisal, rumination, and expression; 2) identified research gaps in the cross-cultural investigation of four strategies (i.e., self-compassion, mindfulness, acceptance, and distraction) that need to be addressed in the future; 3) highlighted methodological inadequacies in the existing cross-cultural research. Following this synthesis of evidence, this thesis focused on the research gap of similarities and differences in self-compassion between Western individuals and East-Asian individuals, with adults from Ireland and China as comparison participants. Moreover, methodological inadequacies were addressed by measuring cultural values at the individual level, testing cultural measurement invariance, reporting the ethnicity of participants clearly, and distinguishing between emotional valences. The results of the cross-sectional survey study presented in Chapter Three supported greater use of self-compassion and a more complex association between self-compassion and cultural values at the individual level in Chinese adults compared to Irish adults. Further, Chapter Four presents an electroencephalography (EEG) experimental study that explored self-compassion both at a behavioural and a neural level among Chinese and Irish university students, while comparing with cognitive reappraisal which is frequently promoted as an adaptive emotion regulation strategy. This experimental study found 1) self-compassion and cognitive reappraisal have efficacy across cultures in relieving negative emotions and promoting positive emotions; 2) neural activation patterns during the particular emotion regulation process differ across cultures, with greater frontal power during self-compassion in the Chinese sample but greater posterior power during cognitive reappraisal in the Irish sample. In summary, this thesis as a whole supports the universal behavioural benefits of self-compassion across cultural groups, whereas there are differences in the use frequency and neural activation patterns between the Chinese and Irish samples. This thesis contributes to the understanding of how culture shapes emotion regulation through both primary empirical studies and the synthesis of available literature.
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Keywords
Emotion , Culture , Electroencephalography (EEG)
Citation
Song, H. 2025. The use of emotion regulation strategies and the related neural activation patterns are influenced by culture. PhD Thesis, University College Cork.