ARE CULTURAL DIFFERENCES IN EMOTION REGULATION MEDIATED BY PERSONALITY TRAITS?

This article reports a study that documents United States–Japan differences in emotion regulation and demonstrates that those differences are entirely accounted for by individual differences in personality. These findings raise questions about studies that merely document cross-national differences in a psychological variable yet attribute the source of the observed differences to cultural variables without empirical justification to do so. Such differences may be accounted for by aggregate differences in personality.