What is a compassionate face? Avoided negative affect explains differences between U.S. Americans and Chinese.

Abstract

While a compassionate face for Germans mirrors others' suffering, for U.S. Americans, a compassionate face is one that expresses a slight smile, partly because U.S. Americans want to avoid feeling negative ("avoided negative affect"; ANA) more than do Germans. The present work examines what people in a non-WEIRD (i.e. Chinese) cultural context think a compassionate face looks like. Additionally, it investigates whether an individually-measured cultural variable (i.e. ANA) can explain differences in conceptualisations of compassion between Chinese and U.S. Americans. Participants in China and the U.S. selected the face that most resembles a compassionate face in a reverse correlation task and completed a measure of ANA. As predicted, Chinese mental representations of a compassionate face included more sadness and less happiness compared to U.S. American mental representations of a compassionate face, and Chinese participants wanted to avoid feeling negative less than did U.S. Americans. Finally, ANA mediated the cultural differences in conceptualisations of compassion. We discuss how ANA and conceptualisations of compassion might be related to how people view the experience versus the expression of different emotions. This work has important implications for therapeutic settings and the meaning of compassion in an increasingly globalised and connected world.