Culture, Display Rules, and Emotion Judgments

This article describes two studies that demonstrate that cultural display rules (Study 1) and emotion regulation (ER; Study 2) are linked to judgments of emotional expressions of others. In Study 1, American and Japanese judges saw faces expressed at four levels of intensity and rated the intensity of the external display and presumed internal experience. They also completed measures of cultural display rules and psychological culture. Display rules accounted for 69% of the variance in cultural differences in ratings across the expression intensities; psychological culture accounted for an additional 14%. In Study 2 American judges saw the same faces and made the same ratings; this time, however, they completed two measures of ER. ER accounted for nearly all of the rating differences across the expression intensities. These studies report the first evidence of a link between an individual’s display rules and ER and judgments of emotion management in others.