Abstract:

The key to our understanding of the meaning of emotions in various culture systems may be the construction of self and the way of self participate in social lives.Many researches demonstrated that the constructions of self can influent the emotional processing directly. People in the literature reach a consensus that in European American cultural contexts there is a strong faith in the independence and autonomy of the self. It means that each individual is seen as an individual who pursues his or her own end. In contrast, in East Asian cultural contexts there is a diametrically opposite view of the self as interdependent.This view assumes that the self is related to one another in a relationship inherently. According to those previous researches, within this rugged individualistic view of the self, positive emotions are also likely to take its specific forms, wherein personal and internal aspects of emotions receive a strong emphasis. Such a Euro-American style of positive emotions can availably be named as individually oriented emotion.Due to the view of emotions asindividually oriented, people are more likely to adopt a short-term hedonic approach to regulate their emotions. They regard positive emotions as good luck and fortune.Therefore, according to a hedonic view, the maximization of pleasant emotions and the absence of unpleasant emotions are core ingredients of emotion regulation strategies. However, within this interdependent model of self, positive emotions are also likely to take one particular form, wherein interpersonal and social aspects of emotions receive a much stronger emphasis. Such an East Asian style of positive emotions can be described as socially oriented emotions. Due to the socially oriented emotions, positive emotion is not just as positive. People may seek to regulate their emotions for reasons other than maximizing pleasure or minimizing pain.Such motivated view of emotions can be named as contra-hedonic emotional regulation. All in all, viewed from the cross-cultural trend, researchers may seek to expand their researches from the following aspects: localization perspective, implicit measurements and socio-cultural paradigm of neural. For example: (1) China is a typical society which holds a great emphasis on collectivistic value. However, there is no research focus on this society in the past researches. It should make a change in cross-cultural research in future time. The previous researches focus on how people understand the meaning of emotions in various culture systems. And it could turn to figure out how Chinese regard their positive emotions and how to regulate their emotions. (2) The previous study methods almost based on self-report and questionnaire which may lead to subjectively results. In the future, from a methodological approach, researchers could use the Implicit Association Test (IAT) paradigm to improve their research instead of behavior investigation. (3) Emotion evocation leads to nervous system activation.A great number of researches have indicated that discrete physiological reactions might be associated with specific emotions.Future research could turn away to the neural physiological differences when people with various cultural contexts perceive positive emotions. This may provide concrete evidences to the difference of emotional processing.