Self and Emotional Experience: A Study of Socially Engaging and Disengaging Emotions and Their Relation to the Self Using Explicit and Implicit Measures

Over the past two decades, much research has surfaced exploring how culture effects the construction of the self. This research largely has investigated the dimension of independent to interdependent self-construals, that is from selves that view themselves as independent of social context and those that view themselves as part of it, and how these construals are effective modes of being within certain cultural contexts. Conclusions from this research suggest that the self-construal permeates the psychological experience of the individual, allowing him or her to understand and act within a particular cultural setting. One such aspect of psychological experience affected by self-construal is the experience of emotion. Research differentiates between two distinct types of emotional experience, that which involves the interaction or presence of others and that which is inwardly focused on the individual, or socially engaging and socially disengaging emotions. This research explores the relationship between cultural self-construal and emotional experience by explicitly examining the frequency and intensity of the experience of socially engaging and disengaging emotions through questionnaires. This research also used a computer program to examine the implicit association of these emotional types with the participant\u27s views of the self. Residents of America and Japan where selected for the study, allowing for between group analysis, as Americans tend to have a more independent self-construal while Japanese tend to be more interdependent. It was hypothesized that interdependent selves would tend to associate socially engaging emotions with the self, while independent selves would associate socially disengaging emotions with the self