Are Slovaks really "more emotional" then Czechs? The probe into emotionality of Czech and Slovak undergraduates

Objectives. The primary objective of the study was to verify the stereotype that Slovaks are "more emotional" than Czechs. In the present paper authors compared the emotionality of Czech and Slovak undergraduates: study focused on the frequency of experienced emotions and on the preferred strategy of emotional expression. Authors assumed that the samples of Czech and Slovak undergraduates would not differ in terms of frequency of emotions but that they would differ in terms of their regulatory strategies. Sample and settings. The Czech (N = 107) and Slovak (N = 144) undergraduates recorded emotional valence, frequency of their emotional experience and their preferred expression of the emotion into a specific questionnaire (an inventory of 80 emotions obtained in previous investigations). Statistical analysis. The collected data was processed based on the average frequency of responses for each emotion. For the comparison of Czech and Slovak frequency of experienced emotion, authors used the t-test for two independent samples and to compare the expressive strategies the chi-square test for comparing the observed and expected values. For the correlation of emotions, authors used the nonparametric Spearman rho correlation coefficient. Results. The results have shown that the emotional connotations are predominantly similar in both samples; however analyses found different connotations for the emotion of pride, which correlated more strongly with negative emotions rather than positive in the Czech sample. Students in the Slovak sample experienced emotions slightly more often than Czech respondents. The samples differ significantly in terms of emotion regulation: the Slovak undergraduates express emotions more openly as compared to Czech students who often deamplify their emotional expressions. Study limitations. The limitations of this study are the facts that the samples were not representative and that the Slovak undergraduates were not involved in the construction of the used inventory of emotions.