Dr. Strategic Emotional Expression among East AsianYouTube Creators: Cross-Regional Patterns in SouthKorea, Mainland China, and Taiwan

Abstract

This study examines how top-ranked, communication-oriented YouTube creators expressemotion across three East Asian platform contexts: South Korea, Mainland China, andTaiwan. Drawing on meta-feeling theory, self-construal and display-rule frameworks, andresearch on digital creator communication, we analyze 1,669 utterances from 60 videos(15 creators × 4 videos), combining multilingual coding of nine emotion categories bytwo independent coders with video-level mixed-effects modeling. Affect-bearingexpression is highest in the Taiwanese sample, while the Korean and Mainland samplesare lower and do not differ significantly from each other (region effect χ²(2) = 14.0, p< .001) ; the difference is not driven by individual creators (ICC ≈ .00) and is stable underleave-one-creator re-estimation. The regions also differ in the kind of emotion expressed(χ²(16) = 56.6, p < .001; Cramér’s V = .37): the Korean sample is Joy-dominant, theTaiwanese sample relational-inquisitive, and the Mainland sample the most evenlydistributed. Leave-one-genre-out analyses show that no single content sub-genreproduces the regional contrast, although genre, being nested within region, cannot be fullyexcluded. The findings characterize the sampled top creators rather than wider creatorpopulations, and the study contributes a reproducible procedure for measuring emotionalexpression across languages.

Keywords: meta-feeling; emotional expression; YouTube creators; East Asian digital media; cross-regional comparison; parasocial communication; qualitative content analysis