While attending graduate school in the United States, associate professor of psychology Birgit Koopmann-Holm received news that her grandmother had died back home in Germany. Navigating grief from afar, Koopmann-Holm was struck by the gestures of compassion from her new acquaintances—particularly American sympathy cards that felt too upbeat for the occasion. “I realized that this is not how my friends back in Germany would respond to this,” she says. Intrigued by this stark contrast, she began to ponder: Why do we express compassion so differently across cultures?
Koopmann-Holm dove headfirst into this inquiry, dedicated to researching the ways in which cultural factors shape people’s emotional lives. Recently, she teamed up with students Alex Beccari ’24 and Monet Oosthuizen ’24 to publish an article on the ways people from different cultural backgrounds notice suffering and show compassion in the journal Social and Personality Psychology Compass.
One key concept in their research is the concept of “avoided negative affect.” Basically, the more people try to avoid feeling negative, the less they notice when others are suffering and the less they focus on the negative when responding with compassion. And, no surprise, this can mess with their own mental health. “Those who want to avoid feeling negative are worse off in terms of their mental health,” Koopmann-Holm explains. “In the U.S., this avoidance is often associated with feeling more negative overall, compared to people in cultures like Ecuador or Mexico, where embracing negative emotions is more common.”
To investigate these cultural differences further, the researchers explored how people perceive compassion, with participants choosing faces they perceived as most compassionate. U.S Americans often associate compassion with smiling faces, while Germans and East Asians lean toward sadder expressions. Participants from Ecuador and Mexico saw that a compassionate face consists of both a smile and an expression of sadness—acknowledging shared pain while also offering support. A common sentiment might be, “I understand your pain, and I’m here for you,” reinforcing community ties and accepting suffering as a part of life.
Additionally, the researchers also analyzed content from U.S. and German sympathy cards. They found that, in line with the breakdowns of what’s considered a compassionate face, U.S. sympathy cards focus on the positive and favor uplifting messages. These cards usually feature encouraging phrases like, “Memories will bring comfort,” and unintentionally downplay sadness. Meanwhile, German cards tend to focus on the negative and take a more somber route to validate pain, with messages such as, “Words will not lighten a heavy heart.”
Ultimately, compassion isn’t a one-size-fits-all concept. “To be truly compassionate, we must first understand what a helpful response looks like for a specific person in a specific cultural context,” Koopmann-Holm concludes. By acknowledging that life encompasses both negatives and positives, we open ourselves to more fulfilling connections.