Culture,Emotions,and the Cold Shoulder: Cultural Differences in the Anger and Sadness Response to Ostracism

Abstract

Ostracism is pervasive across a wide range of cultures. However, little is currently known about how it may be experienced emotionally across cultures. In the current work, we drew on prior cross-cultural evidence and predicted that Westerners would construe social rejection as unfair and unjustifiable (an appraisal consistent with independent self-construal and linked to the emotion of anger) while Easterners would construe the same event not only as unfair but also as situationally constrained and, thus, also “inevitable” (an appraisal consistent with interdependent self-construal and linked to sadness). As predicted, after social rejection within the Cyberball paradigm, European Americans reported experiencing more anger than sadness while East Asians/East Asian Americans (Study 1) and Japanese (Study 2) showed no difference in their levels of these two emotions. In addition, we also found that, compared with European Americans, East Asians/East Asian Americans showed similar levels of overall negative reactions to social rejection (Study 1) while Japanese had a stronger negative response (Study 2). Our findings underscore the central role of culture in shaping the experience of social rejection and suggest possible ways in which people with different cultural backgrounds may cope with it.