Relationship Between Emotional Expression Discrepancy and Life Satisfaction Across Culture and Personal Values

Abstract

People can experience a discrepancy between their ideal and actual emotions. We hypothesized that this emotional discrepancy would be associated with people’s life satisfaction, depending on their culture and individual emotional values. We tested this hypothesis across three cultures (the United States, Hungary, and South Korea) and three broad categories of personal values (hedonic, collaboration, and confrontation). Participants reported the levels of their ideal and actual expression of four discrete emotions (anger, excitement, empathy, and sadness), as well as their levels of life satisfaction and emotion-related personal values. A three-way interaction analysis revealed that the discrepancy in empathy expression (i.e., perceiving self as expressing more empathy than others in one’s culture) increased life satisfaction more among Americans with hedonic values than among Koreans with hedonic values. Furthermore, the discrepancy decreased life satisfaction among Hungarians with hedonic values. In addition, discrepancy in sadness (i.e., expressing more sadness than others) decreased life satisfaction less among Americans with collaboration value, while it decreased life satisfaction more in Koreans with collaboration value. In Hungary, the sadness discrepancy increased life satisfaction among people with collaboration value. Findings suggest that the association between emotional discrepancy and life satisfaction is moderated by both culture and personal values.