A factor-analytic study of cross-cultural differences in emotional rumination and emotional inhibition

The aim of the present study was to explore cross-cultural differences in emotion control, using the Emotion Control Questionnaire [ECQ — Roger, D., & Najarian, B. (1989). The construction and validation of a new scale for measuring emotional control. Personality and Individual Differences, 10 , 845–853]. The ECQ has been extensively validated on English samples, but rather than using the original published factor structure to derive mean scores, the study was based on comparisons between new factor analyses of ECQ data obtained from comparable samples of English, Spanish and Korean subjects. Consistent differences emerged, suggesting that the Korean subjects in particular differed in the way they construed emotional behaviour. Subsequent confirmatory factor analyses suggested that a two-factor model comprising emotional inhibition and emotional rumination offered the best fit for the data across all three samples, and new scales based on these findings are proposed.