Two studies empirically examined cross-cultural differences in people's suppression of emotion and the accuracy with which they detect suppressed emotions in others. In Study 1, Asian-Americans and European-Americans' facial responses to film clips eliciting fear, amusement, sadness and disgust were video-recorded under different instruction conditions (i.e., suppress, freely express, no instructions). Four independent judges (two Asian-American; two European-American) coded the videos for expressivity on the target emotions.

A marginal tendency for Asian-Americans to suppress their emotions (across emotion conditions) more than European-Americans emerged under the no-instruction conditions, but not the other conditions (Study 1). When coder culture and emotion condition were taken into account and participants' self-reported experiences of the target emotions were controlled statistically, Asian-Americans suppressed amusement under no-instruction conditions (as perceived by both Asian-American and European-American coders). Sadness and disgust were perceived less consistently by ingroup vs. outgroup coders across conditions. Fear did not produce any differences by either group of coders. The hypothesis that Asian-Americans naturally suppress emotions more than European-Americans was not supported. At best, such cultural differences must be qualified in terms of specific emotion.

Study 2 involved a subset of the video-recordings from Study 1 (i.e., the emotion suppression videos) coded by hypothesis-naive groups of Asian-Americans and European-Americans who were instructed to identify the emotions of the targets in the videos. This study also examined participants' self-reported use of emotional suppression as a mediator of East-West cultural differences in ability to accurately detect suppressed emotion in others. The two groups of judges in Study 2 did not differ in the accuracy with which they detected suppressed emotions in others, and individual differences in the self-reported use of suppression did not predict accuracy in detecting others' suppressed emotions.

In sum, cultural differences in emotional suppression appeared to be a function of the emotion at hand (e.g., Asian-Americans suppressed amusement more than European-Americans when judged by both ingroup and outgroup coders, but cultural differences are less clear for sadness and disgust, and no cultural differences emerged for fear). No cultural differences emerged in the ability to detect suppressed emotion in others.