People in Ecuador and the United States conceptualize compassion differently: The role of avoided negative affect.

Even people from frequently studied cultural contexts differ in how they conceptualize compassion, partly because of differences in how much they want to avoid feeling negative. To broaden this past work, we include participants from an understudied cultural context and start to examine the process through which culture shapes compassion. Based on ethnographic and empirical studies that include Ecuadorians, we predicted that Ecuadorians would want to avoid feeling negative less compared to U.