ArticleJournal of personality and social psychology2015
Wanting to maximize the positive and minimize the negative: implications for mixed affective experience in American and Chinese contexts.
Article in Journal of personality and social psychology, 2015. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 35 papers.
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Who cites it
35 citing papers in PubMed, 160 citations in OpenAlex.
- Valuing calm enhances enjoyment of calming (vs. exciting) amusement park rides and exercise.Emotion (Washington, D.C.) · 2018Trial
- Patients respond more positively to physicians who focus on their ideal affect.Emotion (Washington, D.C.) · 2015Trial
- Discrepancies between ideal and actual affect predict negative symptoms in schizophrenia in daily life: An ecological momentary assessment study.Psychiatry research · 2026Article
- Cultural Narratives in Elder Care: A Comparative Content Analysis of Canadian and Korean Nursing Home Websites.Journal of transcultural nursing : official journal of the Transcultural Nursing Society · 2025Article
- Positive mental states and their relation to psychosocial resources: protocol of a systematic review focusing on cultural moderators.BMJ open · 2025Article
- Emotion dynamics prospectively predict depressive symptoms in adolescents: findings from intensive longitudinal data.BMC psychology · 2025Article
- The development of specific emotion comprehension components in 1285 preschool children.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- A pilot randomized trial comparing face-to-face and internet-based unified transdiagnostic treatment for adolescents with anxiety and depressive disorders in Iran.Frontiers in psychiatry · 2025Article
- Reducing discrepancies between actual and ideal affect across adulthood: the roles of activity flow conduciveness, pleasantness, and familiarity.Cognition & emotion · 2024Article
- Being Under-Benefited and Perceived Stress in the Relationship Between Aging Parents and Adult Children: The Moderating Role of Empathy.Innovation in aging · 2024Article
- Toward an explanation of cultural differences in subjective well-being: the role of positive emotion norms and positive illusions.Frontiers in psychology · 2024Article
- Changes in Chinese students' academic emotions after examinations: Pride in success, shame in failure, and self-loathing in comparison.The British journal of educational psychology · 2023Article
- People from the U.S. and China think about their personal and collective future differently.Memory & cognition · 2023Article
- Of Mice and Culture: How Beliefs About Knowing Affect Habits of Thinking.Frontiers in psychology · 2022Article
- Affective Profiles and Psychosocial Adjustment among Chinese Adolescents and Adults with Adverse Childhood Experiences: A Person-Centered Approach.Journal of happiness studies · 2022Article
- Culture, Aging, Self-Continuity, and Life Satisfaction.Journal of happiness studies · 2022Article
- Improvement in quality of life and psychological well-being associated with a culturally based psychosocial intervention for Chinese American breast cancer survivors.Supportive care in cancer : official journal of the Multinational Association of Supportive Care in Cancer · 2021Article
- Are need for affect and cognition culture dependent? Implications for global public health campaigns: a cross-sectional study.BMC public health · 2021Article
- Individual differences in thinking style and dealing with contradiction: The mediating role of mixed emotions.PloS one · 2021Article
- The gray matter volume of the temporoparietal junction varies across cultures: a moderating role of the dopamine D4 receptor gene (DRD4).Social cognitive and affective neuroscience · 2020Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
6 authors at 3 institutions in 3 countries.
Funding
Abstract
Previous studies have demonstrated that European Americans have fewer mixed affective experiences (i.e., are less likely to experience the bad with the good) compared with Chinese. In this article, we argue that these cultural differences are due to "ideal affect," or how people ideally want to feel. Specifically, we predict that people from individualistic cultures want to maximize positive and minimize negative affect more than people from collectivistic cultures, and as a result, they are less likely to actually experience mixed emotions (reflected by a more negative within-person correlation between actual positive and negative affect). We find support for this prediction in 2 experience sampling studies conducted in the United States and China (Studies 1 and 2). In addition, we demonstrate that ideal affect is a distinct construct from dialectical view of the self, which has also been related to mixed affective experience (Study 3). Finally, in Study 4, we demonstrate that experimentally manipulating the desire to maximize the positive and minimize the negative alters participants' actual experience of mixed emotions during a pleasant (but not unpleasant or combined pleasant and unpleasant) TV clip in the United States and Hong Kong. Together, these findings suggest that across cultures, how people want to feel shapes how they actually feel, particularly people's experiences of mixed affect.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.