A Cross-cultural Research On Self-Conscious Emotions Of Chinese And American College Students

The research of emotion has achieved a great of improvement since 1990s, especially when the research about self-conscious emotions became the new direction. Comparing to the researches about the basic emotions, such as happy, fear, sad and anger, we can see there are very little researche on the self-conscious emotions, such as shame, guilt and pride and they are even lack of the literature and research reports about self-conscious emotions under the background of the cross-culture researche.In this dissertation, we will explore the types of self-conscious emotions, experience of emotions, the patterns of response, the results of the antecedents of the self-conscious emotions, and other related questions, at the same time the emotion response system coherence regard that these series of questions are related to each other. The latest research found that the non-verbal self-conscious emotion expression is recognized by people under the background of cross-culture. Does it mean it will have the same characters on the types of self-conscious emotions, attributions, appraisal, experience, emotion response? This dissertation has done four studies in order to explore the questions mentioned above, which has found as follows:1. Through the content analysis, we found the personal type of event can arouse more self-conscious emotions; compared to Chinese college students, American college students are more"self-moral", it has the same event type on arousing the feeling of pride between Chinese college students and American college students.2. Through the content analysis, and comparision, we found the main character of attribution is internal attribution; the locus point to"self"; Chinese and American college students have the same pattern on the emotional response among the stability and controllability; the level of"ability"and"effort"on the feeling of pride is higher than the level of shame and guilt; internal appraisal is the main style of evaluation for both countries'subjects, and both cultures they have the same characters on the outer source appraisal.3. Used mixed designs of 2(types of culture)×3(types of self-conscious emotions) in this study. It exits some culture main effect and emotion main effect on different items. Time duration of the emotion is different between Chinese and American; the length of last-time of emotions is different, Chinese college students'last-time is obviously longer than American college students; the location of antecedents are not different between two countries'subjects, but they are different among the three kinds of self-conscious emotions.The shame and pride are more experienced in the"public place"and the guilt is more experienced"at my own home"; the item of"who is absent"is different between cultures, Chinese college students experienced more feeling of shame , guilt and pride when"my family is absent". In addition, American college students felt the shame, guilt and pride when"I was alone"; on the degree of attribution"because youself", American college students is higher than Chinese college students; on the degree of attribution"because of other people", American college students is obviously higher than Chinese college students; on the whole results, the shame and pride attributed more on the"because of other people"; the levels of experience are different, American students'level is higher than Chinese students'level; American students regard the self-conscious emotions are more belonged to the"moral things"; (9) the event of self-conscious emotions influenced the self-esteem and relationship.4. Self-construal affected the self-conscious emotions: Chinese students are mainly interdependent-self, and American students are mainly independent-self; culture can influence the self-conscious emotions; independent-self can predict the guilt and the pride; the independent-self is a mediator variable between culture and self-conscious emotion guilt.