People in Ecuador and the United States Conceptualize Compassion Differently: The Role of Avoided Negative Affect

Even people from frequently studied cultural contexts differ in how they conceptualize compassion, partly because of differences in how much they want to avoid feeling negative. To broaden this past work, we include participants from an understudied cultural context and start to examine the process through which culture shapes compassion. Based on ethnographic and empirical studies that include Ecuadorians, we predicted that Ecuadorians would want to avoid feeling negative less compared to U.S. Americans. Furthermore, we hypothesized that because of these differences in avoided negative affect, compared to U.S. Americans, for Ecuadorians, a compassionate response would contain more emotion sharing, which in turn would be associated with conceptualizing a compassionate face as one that mirrors sadness more and expresses happiness (e.g., a kind smile) less. Using a reverse correlation task, participants in the United States and Ecuador selected the stimuli that most resembled a compassionate face. They also reported how much they wanted to avoid feeling negative and described what a compassionate response would entail. As predicted, compared to U.S. Americans, Ecuadorians wanted to avoid feeling negative less, they conceptualized a compassionate response as one that focused more on emotion sharing, and visualized a compassionate face as one that contained more sadness and less happiness. Furthermore, exploratory analyses suggest that wanting to avoid feeling negative and conceptualizations of a compassionate response as emotion sharing partly sequentially explained the cultural differences in conceptualizations of a compassionate face. What people regard as compassionate differs across cultures, which has important implications for cross-cultural counseling.