What Are Cultural Display Rules

In everyday interactions, emotional expressions provide insight towards how an individual may be feeling. These displays of emotions, however, can be voluntarily controlled. In recent years, there has been a great deal of research on not just how an emotion is indexed, but also why the particular emotion has been shown, both of which playing an enormous role on communication in today's society.
Display rules are cultural conventions that guide how and when individuals monitor their emotional expressions (Ekman & Friesen, 1975). Emotional expressions can be controlled by an individual in many ways. This can be observed mainly through their facial expressions or speech (Ekman & Friesen, 1975), where the individual could neutralize (show no emotion), modulate (alter the degree of emotion) or simulate (show a different emotion) their response. Saarni (1981) suggested that there were many reasons why a person would try to mask the emotion they were exhibiting, two of which include self-protective and prosocial. Display rules that have a purpose of not offending someone, or adhering to “culturally sanctioned emotional-communicative forms” (Saarni, 1981, p. 6), are cultural display rules. On the other hand, there are times when the masking of an emotion is used …show more content…
A total of 144 children from northern Illinois were read eight stories, each containing a situation where it would be necessary for the protagonist to regulate their emotional expressions. They were then asked to decide which face the story character would have made, from five faces, and what the character would have said. It was reported that children did have an understanding of how and when to perform a display rule. When the situation called for a display rule, it was found that as the age increased, so did the understanding of display rules. They also reported that there was no evidence that gender played a role in use of display