Ayushi Budhraja

This or That? Categorizing South Asian Emotional Display Rules.

Started July 23, 2021

Abstract or project description

Previous research has found that cultural display rules and emotion expression vary across cultures. These cultures are often categorized into broad categories (e.g. individualistic vs collectivist cultures; independent vs interdependent cultures). However, there is important variability within these broad cultural groups as well. For example, Mexican and Japanese cultures differ in their emotional expressions even though both are considered to be interdependent cultures. One interesting cultural group that is understudied is South Asian culture. Most emotion research that focuses on interdependent cultures is conducted with East Asian cultures and generalised to other interdependent cultures. This paper investigates how South Asians differ from East Asians in terms of emotion expression and display rules and demonstrates why South Asian cultures are distinct from other cultural groups that were formerly assumed to be similar.