Emotional complexity (the co-occurrence of positive and negative affect) is more prevalent in East Asian than North American cultures. Although researchers have attributed this robust finding to dialectical thinking (tolerance of contradiction), this hypothesis has not been experimentally tested. In this study, dialectical thinking about salient life events was manipulated among mainland Chinese and Euro-American participants, and increased dialectical thinking led to greater emotional complexity. Moreover, Chinese exhibited greater dialectical thinking and emotional complexity than did Euro-Americans, and cultural differences in emotional complexity were mediated by a direct measure of dialecticism (Dialectical Self Scale).
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