The Impact of Conflict Avoidance in East Asian Cultures on Situation Selection

This project investigated how East Asian culture can influence the usage of emotion regulation (ER) strategies, particularly situation selection. We predicted that East Asian participants will have greater usage of situation selection as an ER strategy compared to White participants. In East Asia, conflict avoidance is a key factor that promotes interdependent culture, which is in contrast to the independent culture of Western and White societies. This value of conflict avoidance may be associated with greater usage of situation selection. Thus, we further predicted that the value of conflict avoidance will serve as a mediating variable between ethnicity and situation selection usage. In other words, East Asian participants will have greater tendencies of avoiding conflict, which will be associated with greater usage of situation selection.