Culture weaves the personality of an individual. It embeds various values, customs, beliefs, tradition and norms. It helps us not only in expressing emotions but learning how to feel it in the first place. In collectivists culture like Japan, India and Korea suppressing emotions are considered essential for social harmony, group cohesion and to maintain social norms. The bottling up of negative emotions like anger, and sadness is encouraged for group harmony whereas bottling up of positive emotions lead to decrease jealousy, envy and to maintain relational balance.
However, in Individualistic cultures like United States and European countries, open expression, venting out, being assertive and authenticity is appreciated. Expressing emotions openly lead to positive impact on psychological well-being. Pelz (2025) study find that emotional suppression affects the executive functioning of the brain, impairing limbic system and prefrontal cortex.
The emotional suppression affecting the mental health is mediated through cultural appraisal systems. Findings indicated that emotional suppression in collectivist cultures lead to positive impact on mental health as they value emotional constraints. It reveals that the suppression of emotions is highly mediated through cultural acceptance lens.
Emotional suppression is also influenced by Gender difference, while women are acknowledged to express their emotions but men are expected to suppress it. Majorly, men and women are not appreciated for expressing sadness and anger respectively.
Let’s understand the cultural difference through an example, a group of Texan students were on trip to Vietnam. While traveling in the streets of Vietnam, one of the members tripled and fall on ground. The locals laughed at him and help him stood up. He was feeling awkward by their laughs but it’s common in Vietnam culture to laugh out in serious condition to make the situation light hearted.
In a study on Japanese, the participants were observed while watching a disturbing video while they were alone and with group. The study concluded that individuals watching video alone expressed emotions while watching with group they were emotionally restraint. These explains the concept of Display rules, they are norms that help us decide what, when and how to express emotions. They are learned through observations, reinforcements and feedbacks.
Emotional suppression is used as a defence mechanism by people to deny the pent-up negative emotions. Suppressing the emotions is a voluntarily process. People choose to not express their emotions due to fear of judgement, escape from labelling weak, don’t want to be vulnerable in front of others and not being able to face the negative emotions, etc. The sayings like “Men don’t cry”, “Crying is for weak”, “Don’t be so touchy” etc stops people from expressing their true emotions.
The long impact of bottling up emotions lead to chronic health conditions and affects the mental health. Instead of bottling up emptions, it’s better to practise healthy coping mechanisms like, addressing the negative emotions through journaling, sharing with a trustful person, accepting the feeling and acknowledging it, changing the perspectives and reframing the negative thoughts help in regulating emotions.
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