Based on a combination of diaries and prior trait assessments, daily changes in emotions and coping strategies, as well as their temporal relation patterns with selected predictors, were examined across the stages of an exam. Comparing German and South African students, cultural variability in emotions and coping was in part accounted for by three self-construal types of which two emerged congruently across the two national samples. In essence, findings suggest that within-national variability in exam-related emotions and coping may successfully be dissected through self-construal types at the group level, whose differences, in turn, may be examined for universality at the country level.