Katherine White

Culture, Stress, and Coping Internally- and Externally-Targeted Control Strategies of European Canadians, East Asian Canadians, and Japanese

Two studies examined internally and externally targeted control strategies in response to life stressors in European Canadians, East Asian Canadians, and Japanese. In Study 1, European Canadian, East Asian Canadian, and sojourning Japanese university students in Canada recalled a stressful life event and reported their coping strategies. Respondents also reported current and retrospective self-evaluations that allowed assessment of perceived self-changes over time. Study 2 included East Asian Canadian and European Canadian university students in Canada and Japanese university students in Japan. Both studies revealed that several types of internally targeted control strategies were more prevalent among East Asian participants but that a particular type of internally targeted control strategy, self-enhancing interpretive control, was more prevalent among people with Western English-speaking backgrounds.

Immediacy bias in emotion perception: current emotions seem more intense than previous emotions.

People tend to perceive immediate emotions as more intense than previous emotions. This immediacy bias in emotion perception occurred for exposure to emotional but not neutral stimuli (Study 1), when emotional stimuli were separated by both shorter (2 s; Studies 1 and 2) and longer (20 min; Studies 3, 4, and 5) delays, and for emotional reactions to pictures (Studies 1 and 2), films (Studies 3 and 4), and descriptions of terrorist threats (Study 5). The immediacy bias may be partly caused by immediate emotions salience, and by the greater availability of information about immediate compared with previous emotion. Consistent with emotional salience, when people experienced new emotions, they perceived previous emotions as less intense than they did initially (Studies 3 and 5)-a change in perception that did not occur when people did not experience a new immediate emotion (Study 2). Consistent with emotional availability, reminding people that information about emotions naturally decays from memory reduced the immediacy bias by making previous emotions seem more intense (Study 4). Discussed are implications for psychological theory and other judgments and behaviors.