Exploring the relationship between emotional regulation and family environment.

Although emotions universally are the core of social relationships, expressing and managing them mean something different depending on the culture, mainly because of their differences on life priorities and values. There are also marked differences regarding family attitudes and environments between collectivist and individualistic cultures. The purpose of this study was to explore the relationship between the emotional regulation strategies that people use in their everyday life and their family environment, and compare them among two different cultures. Specifically exploring: (a) levels of cohesion, as the degrees of commitment and support family members provide to one another, (b) levels of expressiveness, the extent to which family members are encouraged to express their feelings directly, and (b) levels of conflict, the amount of the openly expressed anger and conflict among family members. Participants were composed of two samples of undergraduate students: one sample was derived from Mexico and consisted of 457 participants, ages 19 to 34 years old (M = 20.39, SD = 2.55), while the other sample was from the United States and consisted of 310 participants, 18 to 22 years old (M = 19.26, SD = 1.10). Participants completed an online survey with the measures of Emotional Regulation Questionnaire (ERQ; Gross & John, 2003) and the subscales of Cognitive Reappraisal and Expressive Suppression, and the subscales of Cohesion, Expressiveness, and Conflict of the Family Environmental Scale (FES; Moos & Moos, 2009). This individual paper will present the results of this study. For each sample, the descriptive statistics and Pearson correlations between ERQ and FES subscales will be presented. Furthermore, the t-test results of the comparison between the Mexican and American samples for each measure and subscales will be shown. Results will be discussed and suggestions will be offered for further research and practice.