Cultural Value Orientations Shape Why and How We Regulate Others’ Emotions

How people try to influence others’ emotions may depend not only on what they want to change, but also on the cultural value orientations they bring to a social interaction and the motives those values make salient. Here, we ask whether cultural value orientations affect the strategies people use to regulate others’ emotions through different motive emphases. Across two studies, we examined whether individual differences in self-reported allocentric and idiocentric value orientations are associated with distinct motives for regulating others’ emotions and, in turn, distinct extrinsic interpersonal emotion regulation strategies. In Study 1, a 7-day daily diary study (N = 211, 1,557 daily reports) of everyday interpersonal interactions, higher allocentrism was associated with greater use of extrinsic reappraisal, whereas higher idiocentrism was associated with greater use of extrinsic suppression. Allocentrism was also associated with stronger other-serving motives, whereas idiocentrism was associated with stronger self-serving motives. In Study 2, a preregistered follow-up study (N = 428), we tested the same proposed pattern and again found that allocentrism positively predicted extrinsic reappraisal and other-serving motives, whereas idiocentrism positively predicted extrinsic suppression and self-serving motives. Bootstrap mediation analyses supported the predicted indirect effects from allocentrism to reappraisal through other-serving motives and from idiocentrism to suppression through self-serving motives. Together, these findings provide evidence that individual-level cultural value orientations are linked to how and why people regulate others’ emotions. More broadly, the results suggest that motives help explain how value orientations become expressed in distinct forms of extrinsic interpersonal emotion regulation.