Emotional Frankness and Friendship in Polish Culture

According to Wierzbicka (1999), one of the core values of Polish culture is sincerity and emotional frankness, in this study we tested this assumption analyzing display rules operating between friends. 100 respondents completed modified version of the Display Rule Assessment Inventory (Matsumoto, Yoo, Hirayama, & Petrova, 2005). Results show that Polish participants endorse more expression with close friends than with acquaintances and strangers. The obtained differences between those groups were quite large and similar to a pattern typical for collectivistic cultures. On the other hand, we reported high level of overall expressivity, typical of individualism. Such a high expressivity was found for all studied emotions, but pride, which is consistent with previous research on self-presentational modesty in Polish culture (e.g. Dabul, Wosińska, Cialdini, Mandal, & Dion, 1997).