The Rules of Emotional Display in Lecturers of Russian and German Universities

Although emotional display rules and cultural display rules became intensive attention in the last years, university lecturers' display rules in interaction with students have not been studied so far, especially a cross-cultural perspective is missing. This study aimed to find out the association between cultural dimensions, display rules and such aspects of interpersonal interaction as partner's gender and degree of situation publicity in the context of higher education and more specific in the lecturer-student communication. The theoretical frameworks of the study cover the concepts of individualism-collectivism and cultural value orientations in education, as well as the empirical evidence related to cross-cultural differences in overall expressivity, intensity and authenticity of emotion expression and display rules in public and private situations. The results are partly contrary to posted hypotheses and contradict the existing data comparing overall expressivity, display rules, intensity and authenticity of affective expression in participants from collectivistic and individualistic cultures. We found similar patterns of display rules used by Russian and German lecturers dependent on emotion valence, student's gender and situation publicity. We revealed that German academics in comparison to Russian academics show lower expressivity, whereas Russian university lecturers tend to express the experienced emotions with higher authenticity. More specifically, the expression of negative emotions in the group of Russian lecturers in comparison to German lecturers is characterized through higher intensity. We discuss the results from the perspective of 1) “approximation” tendency between cultural value orientations in education in Germany and Russia; 2) cross-cultural differences in recalled emotional experience and 3) gender-specific characteristics of reported emotional expression.