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 express emotion across three East Asian platform contexts: South Korea, Mainland China, and Taiwan. Drawing on meta-feeling theory, self-construal and display-rule frameworks, and research on digital creator communication, we analyze 1,669 utterances from 60 videos (15 creators × 4 videos), combining multilingual coding of nine emotion categories by two independent coders with video-level mixed-effects modeling. Affect-bearing expression is highest in the Taiwanese sample, while the Korean and Mainland samples are 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 under leave-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, the Taiwanese sample relational-inquisitive, and the Mainland sample the most evenly distributed. Leave-one-genre-out analyses show that no single content sub-genre produces the regional contrast, although genre, being nested within region, cannot be fully excluded. The findings characterize the sampled top creators rather than wider creator populations, and the study contributes a reproducible procedure for measuring emotional expression across languages.

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