Instrumental Motives in Emotion Regulation of One’s Own and Others’ Anger: Testing Cross-Cultural Similarities and Differences Between European Americans and Japanese

Abstract

Instrumental motives, such as increasing negative emotions to facilitate performance, are one of the primary motives in regulating one’s own emotions (i.e., intrinsic emotion regulation) and others’ emotions (i.e., extrinsic emotion regulation). However, most instrumental emotion regulation research has been conducted in Western countries, even though desired emotions, such as anger, could vary across Western and Eastern cultures. This research investigates cross-cultural similarities and differences between European Americans and Japanese in instrumental motives for regulating one’s own (Study 1) and others’ anger (Study 2). To this end, the two preregistered studies used the context of playing an aggressive or nonaggressive computer game, a common methodology used in previous research on instrumental anger regulation. The results showed that both European Americans and Japanese significantly preferred angry stimuli for themselves and their partners before playing an aggressive game over a nonaggressive one. We also found that European Americans preferred anger stimuli significantly more than Japanese, although these cultural differences were neither large nor robust. Furthermore, individual differences in the perceived utility of anger were positively associated with a preference for angry stimuli, whereas cultural self-construals were not significantly associated with a preference for angry stimuli among either European Americans or Japanese. This research provides novel evidence for the cross-cultural similarity of instrumental anger regulation in both intrinsic and extrinsic emotion regulation between European Americans and Japanese.