Research Projects

How and Why Ideal Affect Endures and Changes Over Time*

Twenty years ago, we published the first empirical evidence in support of Affect Valuation Theory (AVT) (Tsai, Knutson, & Fung, 2006). In an individual participant data (IPD) meta-analysis (Tsai et al., accepted), we re-examined the first two premises of AVT  in a combined data file of over 31,000 participants from 124 datasets collected by different research teams across the world since Tsai et al. (2006). What do these data reveal, twenty years later? Consistent with Tsai et al. (2006), we observed that: (1) actual affect and ideal affect are empirically distinct constructs, and (2) cultural differences in ideal affect are larger in magnitude than cultural differences in actual affect. These findings held across research teams, participant populations, and publication status. Importantly, most cultural differences in ideal affect endured over time, including European Americans’ greater valuation of high arousal positive (HAP) states compared to East Asian Americans and East Asians. New patterns also emerged: European Americans valued low arousal positive states more over time; differences in ideal affect emerged among specific East Asian cultural groups; and socioeconomic status, gender, and age were also associated with differences in ideal affect.

Current Questions

• Why has European Americans’ valuation of calm and other low arousal positive states increased over time, and what impact does this have on their experiences and behavior? Is this change reflected in cultural practices and products?
• Why do differences in ideal affect among specific East Asian groups (South Koreans,  Japanese, Taiwanese, and Chinese) exist? Are there differences in the ideal affect of South and East Asians?
• What affective states do people from other parts of the world (Latin American, Middle East, Africa) value?
• Are SES, gender, and age differences in ideal affect reflected in cultural practices and products?
• Can we see changes in ideal affect within individuals as they adjust to new cultural environments?

Publications

• Tsai, J. L., Chen, D. S., Yang, A. M., Cachia, J. Y., Blevins, E., Ko, M., ... & Severine, M. (2026). A meta-analytic review of cultural variation in affect valuation. Psychological Bulletin. pdf

Team Members

Elizabeth Blevins

How People View Well-Being

How do these cultural differences in ideal affect influence what people consider essential for well-being and a good life? Is feeling energetic or feeling relaxed equally pleasant for individuals from different cultural backgrounds? Are negative emotions equally distressing for individuals with different cultural values? In work described in Tsai (2024), we observed that consistent with cultural differences in ideal affect, European Americans define happiness and well-being in high arousal positive terms more and low arousal positive terms less than Hong Kong Chinese. Furthermore, when asked which emotions they associated with depression, European Americans were more likely to refer to emotions that were the opposite of high arousal positive states (dull, tired, and other low arousal negative states), whereas Hong Kong Chinese were more likely to refer to emotions that were the opposite of low arousal positive states (afraid, nervous, and other high arousal negative states).

Current Questions

• How does culture shape peoples’ conceptualizations of well-being?
• How are culturally-shaped views of well-being reinforced through cultural products and practices?
• How can we create well-being measures and interventions that are more culturally responsive for the communities they serve?

Publications

• Tsai, J. L. (2024). Investigating culture and emotion from responses to ideals. In M. J. Gelfand, C. Chiu, & Y. Hong (Eds.), Handbook of advances in culture and psychology (pp. 53–117). Oxford University Press. pdf

Team Members

Verity Lua

Which Emotions Spread on Social Media and What Psychological Impact They Have On Users*

Over 5.2 billion people, approximately 63% of the world's population, use social media across diverse cultures to communicate with others and obtain information about the world. Do cultural differences in ideal affect influence what emotions people post and share online, and whether these emotions impact their well-being?  In previous work (Hsu et al., 2021), we showed that in the United States and Japan, Twitter/X users posted content containing affect that aligned with their cultural values, but were more influenced by content posted by others when it contained affect that violated their cultural values. More specifically, U.S. users, who tend to value high arousal positive emotions (such as excitement), posted more intensely positive content, but were most influenced by high arousal negative content. In contrast, Japanese users, who often value low arousal positive states (like calm), posted more low arousal negative content, and were most influenced by high arousal positive content. In a recent series of studies, we have examined how removing high arousal negative content from US users’ feeds impacts well-being and have observed increases in well-being without obvious costs to news use or engagement.

Current Questions

• Will filtering out high arousal negative content on social media have similar effects on well-being in East Asian contexts?
• What impact does filtering out other affect types have on well-being, political polarization, and susceptibility to misinformation?

Publications

• Hsu, T. W., Niiya, Y., Thelwall, M., Ko, M., Knutson, B., & Tsai, J. L. (2021). Social media users produce more affect that supports cultural values, but are more influenced by affect that violates cultural values. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 121(5), 969. https://doi.org/10.1037/pspa0000282. pdf
• Knutson, B., Hsu, T. W., Ko, M., & Tsai, J. L. (2024). News source bias and sentiment on social media. PloS one, 19(10), e0305148. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0305148
• Piccardi, T. Saveski, M., Jia, C., Hancock, J., & Tsai, J.L., & Bernstein, M. (2025). Reranking partisan animosity in algorithmic social media feeds alters affective polarization. Science.
• Schöne, J. P., Rocklage, M. D., Parkinson, B., & Goldenberg, A. (2025). Overestimation in the aggregation of emotional intensity of social media content. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1037/pspa0000458

Team Members

Jonas Schöne, Raphael Uricher, Christy Wang, Tsung-Ren (Tren) Huang

How Ideal Affect Shapes Our Perception and Treatment of Others

When people meet others for the first time, they often form immediate impressions of them. Do these impressions have anything to do with people’s ideal affect? We predicted that when we see someone whose emotional expressions match our ideal affect (what we call an “ideal affect match”), we view them more positively and treat them more like friends than foes. In a series of studies, as predicted, European Americans judged “excited” faces (faces with wide and open toothy smiles) as more affiliative—friendlier, more extraverted, more trustworthy—than did Hong Kong Chinese, in part because European Americans value high arousal positive states like excitement more than Hong Kong Chinese. These cultural differences in social judgments in turn influence whom European Americans and East Asians give money to and with whom they invest. For instance, in behavioral economics games like the Dictator Game and Trust Game, European Americans gave and invested more money in excited (vs. calm and neutral) recipients than did Koreans and Taiwanese.

Current Questions

• Under what conditions are people more or less likely to rely on ideal affect when deciding with whom to share resources? In a series of studies (Cachia et al., 2024) we found that knowing another player’s reputation (how trustworthy they were) moderated how much people based their decisions to share money on the match between their ideal affect and the targets’ reputation. When the player’s reputation was uncertain, participants based their decisions more on targets’ emotional expressions than when the reputation was clearly good or bad. We are examining other factors that might matter. For instance, does having time to think about their decisions make people less likely to rely on their ideal affect when deciding with whom to share resources? Does being in a good (vs. bad) mood make people more or less likely to rely on their ideal affect?
• Do ideal affect mismatches fuel inter-group conflict, prejudice, and discrimination, and can they hinder inter-group trust and cooperation?

Publications

• Cachia, J. Y. A., Blevins, E., Chen, Y., Ko, M., Yen, N., Knutson, B., & Tsai, J. L. (2024) Cultural variation in the smiles we trust: The effects of reputation and ideal affect on resource sharing. Emotion, 24(5), 1025-1043. https://doi.org/10.1037/emo0001450. pdf
• Clobert, M., Sasaki, J., Hwang, K., & Tsai, J. L. (2022). Valuing high arousal negative states increases negative responses toward outgroups across cultures. Emotion, 22(7), 1220–1233. https://doi.org/10.1037/emo0001101. pdf
• Tsai, J.L., Blevins, E., Bencharit, L.Z., Chim, L., Fung, H.H., & Yeung, D.Y. (2019). Cultural variation in social judgments of smiles: The role of ideal affect. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. Advance online publication. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/pspp0000192. pdf, supplement
• Park, B., Blevins, E., Knutson, B., & Tsai, J.L. (2017). Neurocultural evidence that ideal affect match promotes giving. Social Cognitive Affective Neuroscience. 12(7), 1083-1096. pdf, supplement
• Park, B., Genevsky, A., Knutson, B., & Tsai, J. L. (2020). Culturally valued facial expressions enhance loan request success. Emotion, 20(7), 1121–1130. https://doi.org/10.1037/emo0000642. pdf

Team Members

Elizabeth Blevins, Verity Lua

Neural Mechanisms Supporting Social Perception and Resource Sharing

When we see someone whose smile reflects our cultural ideal, we judge them as friendlier and more trustworthy. What neural mechanisms account for this process? One possibility is that people find it more rewarding when they see others whose smiles reflect their cultural ideal. Another possibility is that people identify more strongly with those who express their cultural ideals. A third possibility is that people pay more attention to those who express their ideals. We used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to test these three different mechanisms. ​​We found the strongest support for a reward mechanism. European Americans showed greater activity in the nucleus accumbens, a brain region associated with reward processing, when viewing excited (vs. calm) smiling faces compared to Chinese. In another study, we demonstrated that these cultural differences were specific to responses to excited smiles, and that people who showed greater nucleus accumbens responses to excited smiling faces in the scanner had more friends who showed excited smiles in their profile photos on social media. In another line of research, we have examined how these neural mechanisms influence resource sharing in economic paradigms.

Current Questions

• Do these findings generalize to other East Asian contexts?
• How do cultural differences in ideal affect influence neural responses to negative faces, or types of social punishments?

Publications

• Blevins, E., Ko, M., Park, B., Qu, Y., Knutson, B., & Tsai, J. L. (2023). Cultural variation in neural responses to social but not monetary reward outcomes. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, 18(1), nsad068. https://doi.org/10.1093/scan/nsad068. pdf, supplement
• Park, B., Qu, Y., Chim, L., Blevins, E., Knutson, B., & Tsai, J.L. (2018). Ventral striatal activity mediates cultural differences in affiliative judgments of smiles. Culture and Brain. https://doi.org/10.1007/s40167-018-0061-7.pdf
• Park, B., Blevins, E., Knutson, B., & Tsai, J.L. (2017). Neurocultural evidence that ideal affect match promotes giving. Social Cognitive Affective Neuroscience. 12(7), 1083-1096. pdf, supplement

Team Members

Elizabeth Blevins

How We Respond to and Support Close Others

Do cultural differences in ideal affect shape how people perceive others’ expressions of support? In a series of studies (Cachia et al., in preparation), we are examining this question in the context of romantic couples and find that the ideal affect of one partner shapes whether or not the responses of the other partner are helpful or harmful to the relationship. In the context of sharing positive news, we found that for European American partners and partners who wanted to maximize positivity, positive but low-energy responses (e.g., “that’s nice” in a flat tone) and active negative responses (e.g., sounding doubtful about the positive news) were harmful for relationship satisfaction. In contrast, among Japanese partners and partners who valued maximizing positivity to a lesser extent, these responses were not associated with poorer relationship satisfaction. In sum, how much partners ideally wanted to maximize positivity influenced their perceptions of different types of responses.

Current Questions

• Are the processes the same when partners are sharing bad news?
• Do similar processes apply to friendships?

Publications

• Forthcoming!

Team Members

Verity Lua, Raphael Uricher, Julie Cachia

What Happens When We Perform Affect

Cultures differ in the emphasis they place on being authentic, with European Americans placing a greater emphasis on the ‘unfiltered’ outward expression of thoughts and feelings than East Asians. Are there also cultural differences in how much people  ‘perform affect’ (i.e., express emotions that they do not actually feel), what affect they perform, and the impact of performing affect on their well-being? Our preliminary work (Uricher et al., in preparation) finds that Japanese report performing affect more than do European Americans. However, when they do perform affect, European Americans perform positivity to a more intense degree than do Japanese, consistent with cultural differences in ideal affect. Moreover, performing affect has a more harmful impact on the well-being of European Americans than Japanese.

Current Questions

• Do these findings hold for actual behavior?
• Are there cultural differences in how we judge others who perform affect?

Publications

• Forthcoming!

Team Members

Raphael Uricher

Whom We Want to Lead and How We Respond to Leaders

In Tsai et al. (2016), U.S. leaders were 6 times more likely to show excited expressions in their official website photos than were Chinese leaders, and these differences held for leaders in government, academia, and business. In another study in the same paper, across 11 different nations, the  more a nation valued high arousal positive affect, the more likely its legislators were to show excited smiles in their official photos, and the more a nation valued low arousal positive states, the more likely its legislators were to show calm smiles in their official photos. Together, these findings suggest that leaders’ emotional expressions reflect and reinforce cultural ideals.

Current Questions

• Do cultural differences in ideal affect influence whom people choose for leaders of their own organizations, and does performance of the organization matter? (Elizabeth, Lucy)
• Within a country (Japan), what are the variables (residential mobility, urbanization) that predict whether people chose excited or calm leaders? (Atsuki, Yoshi, Yuri)
• Do people’s ideal affect shape how they respond to their leaders’ displays of emotion? (Henry)

Publications

• Tsai, J.L., Ang, J., Blevins, E., Goernandt, J., Fung, H.H., Jiang, D., Elliott, J., Kölzer, A., Uchida, Y., Lee, Y.-C., Lin, Y., Zhang, X., Govindama, Y., & Haddouk, L. (2016). Leaders' smiles reflect cultural differences in ideal affect. Emotion, 16(2), 183-195. pdf

Team Members

Elizabeth Blevins, Lucy Zhang Bencharit, Atsuki Ito, Yoshi Ono, Yuri Miyamoto, Henry Young

Using Cultural Defaults to Respond to Global Threats*

Can decades of cultural psychology research be used to design culturally responsive solutions to global challenges such as climate change, political polarization, and the advent of AI? We believe the answer is yes.  Our analysis of national differences in responses to the COVID-19 pandemic (with Hazel Markus and Yukiko Uchida) revealed “cultural default” ways of thinking, feeling, and acting that were visible in the behavior of policy-makers and the general public in U.S. and some East Asian contexts during COVID (Markus et al., 2024). In this paper, we outline ways in which policy and other decision makers should consider cultural defaults when responding to current and future threats. These include: (1) recognizing the role of cultural defaults in commonsense responses to a crisis, (2) considering alternate defaults to expand the scope of possibility, (3) framing behavioral recommendations in terms of cultural defaults, (4) addressing cultural defaults at different levels of the cultural cycle (individuals, interactions, institutions, ideas), (5) preparing for resistance to counter-default recommendations, and (6) preparing for revisionist thinking.

Current Questions

• How can we leverage implicit cultural defaults to inform effective messaging about climate action?
• How can we use cultural defaults to understand people’s responses to AI?
• How might cultural defaults surrounding ideal affect fuel responses to outgroup members, political polarization, and intergroup conflict?
• How can we share this knowledge with public policy makers to enact real-world change?

Publications

• Markus, H. R., Tsai, J. L., Uchida, Y., Yang, A. M., & Maitreyi, A. (2024). Cultural defaults in the time of COVID: Lessons for the Future. Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 25(2), 41–91. https://doi.org/10.1177/15291006241277810. pdf
• Markus, H. R., Tsai, J. L., Uchida, Y., Maitreyi, A., & Yang, A. (2025). How US ‘Cultural Defaults’ Challenge American Public Health and What Public Health Officers Can Do About It. SSM-Population Health, 101792. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ssmph.2025.101792. pdf
• Ge, X., Xu, C., Misaki, D., Markus, H., & Tsai, J. L.(2024, May 11-16). How culture shapes what people want from AI (Article 95). In Proceedings of the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’24). Association for Computing Machinery. https://doi.org/10.1145/3613904.3642660

Team Members

Chunchen Xu