Culture's Influence on Experienced and Remembered Emotions

61 p.Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2005.Two studies examined culture's influence on the experience, memory, and generalized self-views about emotions. The studies were designed to examine whether cultural salience influences emotions as they are currently experienced, remembered, or generalized. Study I experimentally manipulated the salience of culture. Participants in the cultural prime condition reported heightened current experience of emotions, but did not differ in remembered emotions, or generalized self-beliefs about emotions. Furthermore, only those emotions that were relevant to the cultural schema that was made salient showed a cultural priming effect. Study 2 further examined the effects of cultural salience on emotions. Culture's influence on the memory of emotions was further unpacked by examining whether cultural salience influenced memories of emotions at the episodic level or at the semantic level. In addition, Study 2 examined the effect of cultural salience on emotions within a multicultural context, when participants can be expected to have access to a number of different cultural schemas. Results indicate that the salience of one cultural schema can mask the effects of other possible cultural schemas. Results contribute new knowledge about the effects of cultural schemas on emotion, and raise interesting theoretical questions about emotion, values, and acculturation.U of I OnlyRestricted to the U of I community idenfinitely during batch ingest of legacy ETD