Are Southerners More Likely To Use Expressive Suppression?

Emotional regulation is a process in which individuals exert influence on emotional experience,occurrence time,and how to express emotion.Culture will influence peopled motivation to regulate their emotions that is the extent to which emotional regulation may occur.Individuals in collectivist culture regulate their emotions more frequently than individuals in individualistic culture.As a typical collectivism culture country,there are also differences in collectivism within China,and there may also be differences in the use of emotion regulation strategies.The purpose of this study is to explore the effects of culture in southern and northern China on the frequency of the use of emotional adjustment strategies in this cultural group.In the first study,the emotional adjustment questionnaire was used to control the parental rearing style,parent-child attachment relationship,personality characteristics and demographics,and so on,to explore the differences in the frequency of expressive suppression and cognitive reassessment strategies between southermers and northerners in the process of emotional regulation.In the second study,peer-evaluation was used to further verify whether the frequency of expressive suppression used by southerners and northermers in the process of emotional regulation was also affected by cultural differences.In the third study,we try to explain the differences in the frequency of the use of emotional regulation strategies from the perspective of self-construction.The results showed that there were differences in the frequency of use of emotional regulation strategies between southermers and northerners,and more expressive suppression strategies were used by southermers,but these differences were not caused by family rearing style,parent-child attachment and personality characteristics.It may be due to the influence of different cultural models in the south and the north which makes the southerners are more inclined to rely on self-construction and will more suppress emotional experience and expression to maintain interdependence with others while northerners tend to be more independent.Self-construction will more emotionally experience and express the individual needs and internal motivation.