Maya Tamir

Monday, Oct. 23, 2023 (3:30 PM – 5:00 PM)

Emotion Regulation and Culture

To thrive in stressful environments, people worldwide must cope with emotional distress. They can do so by engaging in emotion regulation, which is the process by which people influence emotions. It is driven by the motivation to change emotions in a particular direction, and pursued by implementing selected emotion regulation strategies. Although our understanding of emotion regulation has grown dramatically in recent decades, most of the research on which it is based has been conducted in Western countries, and we still know relatively little about how emotion regulation varies across cultures.

In this talk, Maya Tamir will discuss potential cultural differences in attention to emotion regulation, the motivation to decrease unpleasant emotions, and the links between emotion regulation strategies and psychological health. Tamir will share data from several projects that were conducted during the COVID-19 pandemic, examining aspects of emotion regulation across countries around the globe. Together, the findings will highlight the importance of sensitivity to the cultural context when managing emotional desires.

Maya Tamir is a Professor of Psychology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in Israel. She completed her PhD at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and her post-doctoral training at Stanford University. Her research explores how and why people try to influence emotions in themselves and others, and how this affects mental health, social relationships, and well-being.