Psychology assumed that helping others feel better was a universal human motive. A study of 6,900 people just showed it is not
When someone you care about is upset, the impulse feels automatic. You reach toward them, you say something reassuring, you try to shift the mood. If you grew up in the United States, Germany, or the United Kingdom, this response probably feels not just natural but morally obvious. Leaving someone to sit in their pain without trying to alleviate it can feel like a failure of empathy, a withdrawal of care. The entire edifice of Western therapy is built on this premise: negative emotions are problems, and helping someone feel better is the goal.
A new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences has tested that premise across 17 countries and more than 6,900 people. What it found is that the impulse to eliminate another person’s distress is not a human universal. It is a cultural product, specific to societies that organize themselves around individual happiness and personal achievement. In collectivistic cultures, which account for the majority of the world’s population, negative emotions are not problems to be solved. They are tools to be used, and the most caring thing a person can do is often to leave them intact.
What the research measured
The study was led by Dr. Maya Tamir and PhD student Shir Ginosar Yaari of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, who brought together researchers from universities across Europe, Asia, North and South America, Africa, and the Middle East. The investigation combined three complementary approaches: large-scale surveys across 17 countries, and daily diary tracking of romantic couples in Germany and South Korea, two nations that represent contrasting ends of the individualism-collectivism spectrum.
The researchers distinguished carefully between two types of emotional regulation: intrapersonal, which is how people manage their own emotions, and interpersonal, which is how people try to manage the emotions of others. They expected to find cultural differences in both. What they found was that the differences were almost entirely concentrated in the interpersonal dimension.
Across all 17 countries, people showed nearly identical motivation to make themselves feel better when experiencing negative emotions. The drive toward personal emotional relief appears to be genuinely universal. But the moment the question shifted to other people’s emotions, the cultural divergence became sharp and consistent.
The individualistic model: distress as a problem to fix
In highly individualistic nations, the study found a clear motivational pattern. Participants were strongly driven to reduce the distress of people around them. When they saw a partner, friend, or colleague in pain, their instinct was to intervene: to offer reassurance, to help reframe the situation, to encourage acceptance, to provide the kind of active emotional support that Western psychology has spent decades codifying into therapeutic technique.
This pattern had measurable consequences for relationships. In the German couple data, how motivated a partner was to reduce the other’s distress was a significant predictor of how close the couple felt. Trying to make your partner feel better was not just emotionally meaningful in Germany, it was what closeness looked and felt like.
The daily diary data confirmed this dynamic in real time. On days when one partner was more motivated to help the other feel better, both partners reported stronger feelings of intimacy. The connection between emotional comfort and relational closeness was not assumed but measured.
The collectivistic model: distress as a tool to keep
In collectivistic nations including South Korea, Japan, India, and China, the picture was fundamentally different. Participants were significantly less motivated to reduce others’ distress, not because they cared less about the people around them, but because they held a different understanding of what negative emotions are for.
Across collectivistic cultures, the study found a consistent belief that unpleasant emotions serve valuable functions. Sadness can drive self-reflection. Shame can motivate personal improvement. Grief can honor the significance of a loss. Anxiety can signal that something important is at stake. Attempting to eliminate these emotions prematurely, to cheer someone up before those functions have been served, is not kindness. It is interference.
“We often assume that if someone is suffering, the kind thing to do is to make them feel better,” said Dr. Tamir. “Our findings suggest that this assumption reflects cultural values more than universal human nature.”
The Korean couple data showed the practical consequence of this difference. Unlike in Germany, a partner’s motivation to reduce the other’s distress in South Korea had no relationship to reported closeness. What made a couple feel close in Seoul was not the same as what made a couple feel close in Berlin. The behaviors that build intimacy are themselves culturally encoded.
Why culture matters more for others’ emotions than our own
The study’s most counterintuitive finding was not the difference between cultures but where within emotional regulation the difference showed up. Most researchers expected to find cultural differences in how people handle their own feelings. That turned out to be where culture mattered least.
The divergence was largest for interpersonal emotion regulation, for what people believe they should do about someone else’s feelings. The researchers suggest this reflects the different functions that intrapersonal and interpersonal regulation serve. Personal emotional regulation is primarily about individual wellbeing, a domain where the biological drive toward feeling better is strong enough to override cultural variation. Interpersonal emotion regulation is primarily about social relationships and moral obligations, domains where culture holds far more authority.
What a person believes they owe someone who is suffering, whether they owe comfort, or space, or shared silence, or practical help, or nothing at all, is a question that culture answers before the individual even has a chance to deliberate. The feeling that intervention is obviously the right response is itself a culturally transmitted belief, so thoroughly internalized that it can feel like instinct.
The implications for a globalized world
The researchers are explicit that these findings have direct practical consequences for contexts where people from individualistic and collectivistic backgrounds interact. Multicultural couples where one partner tries to fix the other’s emotions while the other partner finds that intervention intrusive or dismissive. International workplaces where a manager’s effort to boost team morale after a setback reads as shallow to colleagues from cultures that expect to sit with difficulty. Healthcare systems designed around Western therapeutic norms being delivered to patients whose cultural framework does not share those norms. Therapists trained to help clients feel better encountering clients for whom feeling worse in the short term is understood as the path toward something more important.
The misunderstandings that arise in these situations are not failures of empathy. They are failures to recognize that empathy itself is expressed differently depending on what a culture believes negative emotions are for.
“Culture doesn’t just shape how we experience emotions,” said Dr. Tamir. “It shapes what we believe other people should feel and how we think we can best help them.”
The study does not conclude that one model is superior to the other. Whether it is better to help people feel better quickly or to preserve the emotional state that drives reflection and growth is not a question science can answer. What the study establishes is that both approaches are coherent, both are rooted in genuine care, and the assumption that comfort means the same thing everywhere is not supported by data from 17 countries and nearly 7,000 people.
The question the researchers close with is not rhetorical. It is a practical reorientation for anyone who works across cultures, or loves someone from one. Rather than asking how to make someone feel better, the question is whether feeling better is what they need.
Source
Shir Ginosar Yaari, Maya Tamir et al. “People in more individualist cultures are more motivated to make others feel better.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2026.
DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2533994123
