A new global study spanning 17 countries has found that people in more individualistic cultures are more motivated to help others feel better and are more likely to act on that motivation, challenging a long-held assumption in psychology that this drive is universal.
The research was led by Dr Maya Tamir and PhD student Shir Ginosar Yaari of the Department of Psychology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). While psychologists have long studied how people regulate their own emotions, the study instead examined how people try to regulate the emotions of others.
The research drew on 6,900 participants across Europe, Asia, Africa, North and South America, and the Middle East, making it one of the broadest investigations of interpersonal emotion regulation to date. The team also followed couples in Germany and South Korea in their daily lives to observe how partners naturally respond to each other’s emotions.
Participants from more individualistic countries, such as Germany, the US, and the UK, were on average more motivated to help others feel better. In these cultures, people were more likely to comfort others by expressing care, listening, encouraging acceptance, and helping them reframe difficult experiences, and less likely to encourage emotional suppression or dwelling on negative feelings.
Participants from more collectivistic countries, including South Korea, Japan, India, and China, were less likely to view unpleasant emotions as something that must be eliminated. Rather than treating discomfort as a problem to fix, these cultures may view unpleasant emotions as serving valuable purposes: promoting self-improvement, strengthening relationships, encouraging reflection, or helping people find meaning.
“We often assume that if someone is suffering, the kind thing to do is to make them feel better,” said Dr Tamir, senior author of the study. “Our findings suggest that this assumption reflects cultural values more than universal human nature.”
Perhaps the study’s most surprising finding was that culture mattered more in how people tried to influence others’ emotions than in how they tried to manage their own. Across all countries studied, people were similarly motivated to make themselves feel better; what varied was how much they wanted to change someone else’s emotional state.
“Culture doesn’t just shape how we experience emotions,” said Dr Tamir. “It shapes what we believe other people should feel and how we think we can best help them.”
The researchers say misunderstandings in an increasingly interconnected world often arise not because people care less, but because they express care differently. Recognising these cultural differences could improve communication and support in multicultural families, international workplaces, education, and healthcare settings.
The findings also carry implications for AI and mental health applications and for cross-cultural training in global organisations. Interest in this area has grown alongside reported rises in anxiety, with policymakers paying closer attention to research on cultural differences in mental health support. The consistency the researchers found in self-focused emotion regulation, contrasted with the divergence in interpersonal emotion regulation, suggests that mental health professionals working with diverse populations should weigh cultural norms rather than apply universal assumptions about emotional care.
The Hebrew University team hopes the work, published in PNAS, will promote greater empathy and adaptability as societies increasingly navigate emotional well-being across cultural lines.