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Emotion Processing In The Survival Paradigm, Destiny Valentine

Psychology

The literature shows that words processed according to their survival relevance typically produce a memory advantage. Similarly, words containing an emotional connotation tend to lead to better memory. The current study examined whether combining both the survival processing effect and the emotion processing advantage would cause an interaction that amplified the effects on memory. Using a modified version of the traditional survival processing paradigm, participants rated emotion words (positive, negative, or neutral) on their relevance to a survival context or home-moving control context. They were later given a surprise recall task for the rated words. The results did not show …

Asian Americans Respond Less Favorably To Excitement (Vs. Calm)-Focused Physicians Compared To European Americans, Tamara Sims, Birgit Koopmann-Holm, Henry Young, Da Jiang, Helene Fung, Jeanne L. Tsai

Psychology

OBJECTIVES:

Despite being considered a "model minority," Asian Americans report worse health care encounters than do European Americans. This may be due to affective mismatches between Asian American patients and their European American physicians. We predicted that because Asian Americans value excitement (vs. calm) less than European Americans, they will respond less favorably to excitement-focused (vs. calm) physicians.

METHOD:

In Study 1, 198 European American, Chinese American, and Hong Kong Chinese community adults read a medical scenario and indicated their preference for an excitement-focused versus calm-focused physician. In Study 2, 81 European American and Asian American community college students listened …

The Cultural Shaping Of Compassion, Birgit Koopmann-Holm, Jeanne L. Tsai

Psychology

In this chapter, we first review the existing literature on cross-cultural studies on compassion. While cultural similarities exist, we demonstrate cultural differences in the conception, experience, and expression of compassion. Then we present our own work on the cultural shaping of compassion by introducing Affect Valuation Theory ( e.g., Tsai, Knutson, & Fung, 2006), our theoretical framework. We show how the desire to avoid feeling negative partly explains cultural differences in conceptualizations and expressions of compassion. Specifically, the more people want to avoid feeling negative, the more they focus on the positive (e.g., comforting memories) than the negative (e.g., the …

The Effects Of Interpersonal And Noninterpersonal Loss On Music Preference, Alberte Bjornsson

Psychology

Through a series of studies, Lee, Andrade, and Palmer (2013) predicted and found that sadness caused by an interpersonal loss creates greater preference for listening to mood-congruent music than sadness caused by a noninterpersonal loss. However, in their experimental procedures, they inadvertently confounded the intensity of the sadness induced in the noninterpersonal and interpersonal sadness conditions, such that the interpersonal sadness condition created stronger feelings of sadness. The current study sought to replicate Lee et al.’s (2013) findings with the modification of unconfounding the intensity of sadness in the interpersonal and noninterpersonal conditions. After controlling for intensity, this study found …

Focusing On The Negative: Cultural Differences In Expressions Of Sympathy, Birgit Koopmann-Holm, Jeanne L. Tsai

Psychology

Feeling concern about the suffering of others is considered a basic human response, and yet we know surprisingly little about the cultural factors that shape how people respond to the suffering of another person. To this end, we conducted 4 studies that tested the hypothesis that American expressions of sympathy focus on the negative less and positive more than German expressions of sympathy, in part because Americans want to avoid negative states more than Germans do. In Study 1, we demonstrate that American sympathy cards contain less negative and more positive content than German sympathy cards. In Study 2, we …

Choosing A Physician Depends On How You Want To Feel: The Role Of Ideal Affect In Health-Related Decision Making, Tamara Sims, Jeanne L. Tsai, Birgit Koopmann-Holm, Ewart A.C. Thomas, Mary K. Goldstein

Psychology

When given a choice, how do people decide which physician to select? Although significant research has demonstrated that how people actually feel (their “actual affect”) influences their health care preferences, how people ideally want to feel (their “ideal affect”) may play an even greater role. Specifically, we predicted that people trust physicians whose affective characteristics match their ideal affect, which leads people to prefer those physicians more. Consistent with this prediction, the more participants wanted to feel high arousal positive states on average ([ideal HAP]; e.g., excited), the more likely they were to select a HAP-focused physician. Similarly, the more …

Evidence For Universality In Phenomenological Emotion Response System Coherence, David Matsumoto, John B. Nezlek, Birgit Koopmann-Holm

Psychology

The authors reanalyzed data from Scherer and Wallbott's (Scherer, 1997b; Scherer & Wallbott, 1994) International Study of Emotion Antecedents and Reactions to examine how phenomenological reports of emotional experience, expression, and physiological sensations were related to each other within cultures and to determine if these relationships were moderated by cultural differences, which were operationally defined using Hofstede's (2001) typology. Multilevel random coefficient modeling analyses produced several findings of note. First, the vast majority of the variance in ratings was within countries (i.e., at the individual level); a much smaller proportion of the total variance was between countries. Second, there were …