It has been a while since I read a book that did not captivate me by its writing but was nonetheless illuminating. Batja Mesquita's book "Between Us", on how cultures produce emotions, in a compliment so backhanded it would make Roger Federer proud, did just that. Mesquita's prose is very "pop science", though not in an irritating way, just a bit bland. Her message, however, that our emotions how we talk about them is culturally specific, was very welcome.

I found that the most convincing argument that Mesquita puts forward for this concerns language. She argues that it is actually difficult to have a common language around emotions:

The first thing to know is that not all languages have a word for “emotion” itself. The category, as we think we know it, is historically new, and geographically unique... In some languages emotions are grouped with other sensations such as fatigue or pain, in others they are grouped with behaviors... Emotion vocabularies in some languages — such as Chewong in Malaysia — count as few as seven emotion words, and other languages count in the thousands, with English containing more than two thousand emotion words. There is no question, therefore, that languages organize the domain very differently, and make both different kinds as well as different numbers of distinctions... Many languages fail to make the distinctions that seem obvious in English, such as those between anger, sadness, love, and shame. Some of the most central emotion concepts (as we distinguish them in English) share a word in other languages: for example, native speakers of Luganda, a language spoken in Uganda, use the same word, okusunguwala, for “anger” and “sadness.” Native Luganda interpreters had a hard time making the distinction between anger and sadness in English. Similar blends of anger and sadness are found in other languages.

Mesquita often talks of "WEIRD" (White, Educated, Industrialised, Rich and Democratic) cultures, in which emotions are understood as inner mental states. She calls this perspective "MINE" (Mental, Inside the person, and Essentialist) emotions, and argues that languages of these cultures (e.g. English) reflect this understanding. However, this appears to be an exception, rather than a rule. Many other cultures understand emotions as OURS - Outside, Relational and Situated. Emotion concepts, then:

... are sets of cultural episodes that we have experienced, directly or by observation, supplemented with the cultural lore of an emotion category. And to the extent that people’s emotion lexicons and experiences differ across cultures, so will the emotional experiences that they distinguish. This is not a radically constructionist view: cultures cannot invent people’s emotions from the ground up. This is because all our emotions are situated within relationships between people, who themselves are confined by the bodies that make them up. Human relationships and human bodies have a lot in common across cultures, but they also allow for much variation.

Even when emotion concepts seem to be fairly universal, for example anger, shame, love or happiness, their "value" or purpose may differ. I've quoted a number of passages that illustrate this in the quotes below, but here's just one which I found surprising:

Japanese psychologists Yukiko Uchida and Shinobu Kitayama compared U.S. with Japanese conceptions of happiness and found that, in contrast to U.S. students, who saw their happiness as exclusively positive, Japanese college students routinely listed negative features of happiness: Happiness is “elusive,” because it never lasts, it is hard to put your finger on, and it is deceptive (distracting from reality). Happiness is “socially disruptive,” because it makes people inattentive to their environment and their obligations, and because it risks eliciting the envy or jealousy of others.

Mesquita roughly categorises emotions that are "right" or "wrong" in a particular culture. Having the "right" emotion allows you to flourish in a particular setting while having the "wrong" one is a warning that you are violating one or more norms. Take anger for example:

Anger is a claim for dominance, which is “right” in cultures that emphasize entitlement and individual autonomy, right in cultures where people compete for the scarce good of honor, but “wrong” in cultures that emphasize kindness for all living creatures or harmonious relationships.

As someone who is obsessed with figuring out what I "should" do, how I "should" feel and behave, this feels quite liberating. Mesquita takes a step back and observes that what is right and wrong emotionally is socially constructed. When I feel happy and excited because I passed my driving test (it took 7 fucking tries, so I was over the moon) it's because, coming from a WEIRD culture, I have been taught to be happy when I succeed something and to chase that emotion. I would not experience this event in the same way as, say, someone from Turkey, who, according to Mesquita, would be quick to share this success with and attribute it to their family and close friends.

Mesquita also alludes briefly to how this different experience of emotional episodes is constructed by other factors such as race, gender, class and upbringing:

I am very certain that I will never be able to make a go-to reference manual on cultural differences in emotions; nor will anybody else. To grasp the absurdity of the task, ask yourself: How would I deal with the emotions of a Dutch person, any Dutch person? (Substitute, as you wish, “Catholic Irish American,” “white American from Boston,” “Japanese from Tokyo,” . . . for “Dutch.”) What emotions do they have? How to understand these emotions? What do these emotions look like in behavior? The answers to those questions would all depend on who the Dutch person is, what their history is, their gender and position in society, their specific predicaments. It depends on what they as an individual specifically care about at that moment, what the relational context is, and what specifically is at stake. It will also depend on whom they are interacting with, and what these people’s responses are.

All this is liberating because it helps me to be compassionate towards myself. For example, let's say I feel ashamed for not helping around the house enough. This shame makes me retreat from others, because that's generally how shame works in WEIRD societies. It is not the kind of shame that motivates me to mend a relationship (in this case, with the house plants). I am quite pissed off that I feel shame, because I want to be a caring person and help out more, but my shame blocks me by turning my body into a slow moving sack of jelly. So instead I spend an hour or so moping and smoking cigarettes. But getting pissed off is good, because anger will sometimes translate into giving myself a (figurative) kick up the arse and I will actually disinfect the house plants. Now, this could all be coated with a copious spoonful of self-hatred about how I don't have the right instincts and really I can't wait to be reincarnated as a mop because at least then I would be useful OR I can just take a step back and understand that this is all perfectly fine and predictable given my history. With time and effort, I will eventually cultivate happiness as I disinfect plants (I assume that this is how you keep them alive).

What I've just described is the process of deconstruction as I understand it. Deconstruction happens when you notice some behaviour that you want to change. In the last example, I want to help out more. To change it, you analyse your behaviour - Why am I doing this? Who or what taught me to do this, and why? This analysis can make it easier to change your behaviour, but ultimately change will always be uncomfortable because you have been educated to act and feel in certain ways (and, as Mesquita points out, the two are closely linked). Going against these instincts will feel like violating a norm, even if you don't rationally agree with that norm. While you're re-wiring your brain to have the "right" emotional episodes, changing your behaviour is going to be a right pain in the arse.

I brought up deconstruction as a safeguard against the ethical relativism that reading "Between Us" provoked in me. Yes, right and wrong may be relative and not absolute concepts, but

1. I am alive
2. I live in a society which requires collective agreement on what is right or wrong and
3. I disagree with quite a few of those norms dictating what is right or wrong, and I want to change them.

Admittedly, this is much more difficult in diverse and complex societies such as Belgium's, or even just Brussels. As a general rule, the smaller a society is, the easier it is to have a similar way of relating with one another, but with globalisation, and the (forced) homogenisation and centralisation that accompanies it, that task becomes harder and harder.

Let me try to end this elegantly. By understanding how emotions are culturally and socially constructed, we can show more compassion towards ourselves and others while we collectively work towards societies that enable humans to flourish. Or just, like, societies where we don't routinely murder and sexually abuse children. That would be a good start.

Quotes

Page numbers are based on the English edition, 2024

On suppressing emotions:

Does it make them ["cultural others"] unhappy to not express their emotions? Does their anger or grief resurface at other, improper times? It does not seem so. In many cultures, people consider their emotions to be "negotiated" with the social environment, rather than leading a separate life inside them... If authenticity - expressing one's inner feelings - is regarded as a virtue in Western cultures, it is construed as a sign of personal immaturity in many non-Western cultures, such as Japan. ... For American [service workers], putting on an act felt like faking that they are in a good mood, but Chinese service workers did not see it as faking at all. To the Chinese service workers, aligning their emotions with the requirements of the situation may have been nothing out of the ordinary. Emotional attunement to the needs of others and the situational requirement is having an OURS focus on emotion, and is quite different from faking it. (p. 46)

A final reflection on the terms emotional expression and emotional suppression is that they may themselves be suggestive of a MINE model of emotions. They imply that there is a deep inner feeling that wants to come out, or alternatively, has to be actively suppressed. Expression and suppression privilege a view of emotions as inside the person, and naturally wanting to come out. When emotions are conceived of as acts between people, rather than feelings within, then no “expression” is naturally privileged over another. There is no essence to be expressed. There is no reason to assume that any emotional act is more authentic, or to the contrary, less. There is also no reason to think it is unnatural to meet social expectations. If emotions live between people, then why would yelling in anger be any more natural than Hiroto and Chiemi’s accommodation to the expectations of their environments? Why would silently mourning by yourself be any more natural than wailing with the professional mourners? Why would managing your emotions to accommodate the expectations of the social environment be any more phony than asserting your frustrations? (p. 49)

How WEIRD societies reward anger:

There are several striking examples from research within Western Europe and the United States showing that emotions that are rewarded will become habitual. Temper tantrums occur more among children whose parents give in to their desires. And children whose parents only respond to their negative emotions end up showing those emotions more than children whose parents also attend to them when they communicate less urgency (insecurely versus securely attached children). Similarly, gender differences in anger expression may be associated with differential rewards for men and women expressing the same emotion. Expressing anger seems to be more rewarding for men than for women. In a psychological experiment, women were made to be more angry and men less by merely reversing the reward patterns. Women received points when they were aggressive, and men received points when they were friendly in an interactive game. When rewarded, women started to be more angry, even within the course of an experiment. (p. 53)

The use of fear in avoiding norm violations in Bara society:

Corporal punishment induces fear in Bara children: merely thinking of norm-violating behavior induces a strong fear for the potential consequences. Bara children may be conditioned to avoid those consequences rather than internalizing the societal norms; in that sense, Western research may be right. Yet, internalization may not be necessary in Bara society, given that Bara children are surrounded by the watching eyes of many ever-present adults. Even in adult life, fear may do the job. By the time Bara kids have grown strong enough to fight back, and no longer have to fear corporal punishment from their elders, they have adopted the collective fear of ancestral spirits who seem to replace the elders. Norm violations are believed to “so enrage one’s own ancestral spirits that they will inflict diseases and other calamities on the norm violator and his descendants. This rage of ancestral spirits is believed to be potentially fatal if not appeased by sacrificial offerings.” The omnipresence of the ancestral spirits makes tahotsy (fear) a virtue; individuals with tahotsy will remember to respect the social norms. (p. 66)

How children are raised to have the "right" emotional episodes:

Children learn that some emotions are right, when having or showing these emotions meets with approval from the parents and the larger community, or when not having or showing them meets with disapproval. Think about the South Baltimore mothers who encouraged their little daughters to be angry when taken advantage of, and teased their girls to provoke anger. Children also learn not to feel or show certain emotions, when having or showing these emotions is met with disapproval or when they are being ignored altogether when showing these emotions. Utku Inuit children, Taiwanese toddlers, and Nso babies learned that being upset was wrong because they met disapproval or were being ignored when they were. Children also learn which emotions are right by observing parental emotions. Parental love, anger, and shame provide children with models for their own emotions.

Becoming part of a culture means having certain kinds of emotions rather than others. Which kinds of emotions are foregrounded depends on the type of adult that is valued. In communities that foreground individual achievement, children need to feel good about themselves (pride). In communities that value obedience, or view the world as a dangerous place, children need to know fear. Communities focusing on propriety encourage shame. Inducing a given emotion is never good or bad in broad terms, but good or bad in a certain cultural context or community, depending on the goals of child-rearing. Beating, and inducing fear, are not bad in general, but bad in a culture that values self-confident and self-propelled children. (White American middle class families constitute one such context.) (p.81)

On right and wrong emotions:

In each culture, certain emotions are right and others are wrong. Right emotions help to foster relationships that are valued in the culture and wrong emotions support condemned forms of relating. Right emotions are culturally encouraged and rewarded, and wrong emotions are culturally avoided and punished. This is, very simply speaking, the logic of cultural differences in emotions. Cultural differences in emotions owe their logic to an OURS model of emotions—to what they do in our social and cultural worlds. (p. 84)

On racial differences on anger:

The legitimacy of [Black Americans'] anger is often challenged, and any anger is held against them. In a 2020 Op-Ed in the New York Times, political scientist Davin Phoenix makes this point precisely:

"... America has very different standards for who gets the privilege of expressing anger and defiance, without fear of grave consequence. Angry white agitators can be labeled good people, patriots and revolutionaries, while angry black agitators are labeled identity extremists, thugs and violent opportunists. Anger is about entitlement, and if others deny you that entitlement, it may turn against you." (p. 90)

How shame can be good or bad:

The bad rap of shame is also clear from the attention it has received among clinical psychologists, mostly psychoanalysts. Where the developing child is seen to be secure, happy, and full of self-esteem, the neurotic child is afraid of disapproval, and therefore, prone to shame. And at the root of the child’s neurosis are detached or critical parents. These parents are doing the opposite of what is culturally valued: making their child feel bad (rather than good) about themselves. Not surprisingly, then, individuals who are easily ashamed are vulnerable to depression, anxiety, and somatic symptoms, always carrying the critical parent with them, and seeing everyone else as unescapably critical as well. The latter may be the reason for shame turned-anger: a critical other is an easy scapegoat, and it is “a short step to attribute the cause of painful shame feelings to others who are perceived as disapproving.” If the meaning of shame itself already interferes with the cultural ideals of self-esteem and being loved, then humiliated fury does not help its reputation. If anything, the hostility that is marshaled as a defense against shame helps to reinforce the idea that the shameful person is anti-social. But does shame have to be “wrong”?

In many cultures, shame or a mild form of shame, is omnipresent and “right.” Remember, the Minangkabau and Taiwanese kids are raised to have shame, as a way to make them take their proper place in their networks. Showing shame is a virtue rather than a sign of weakness. When the primary cultural goal is to meet the social expectations for your role, showing an awareness of your violations is appreciated. Shame tells others that you know your place, that you are prepared to do what it takes to be accepted by them. Shame also means that you take others’ perspective in the situation: How are you doing in their eyes? Are you meeting their expectations? Shame, in other words, indicates that you care about your bond with others. (p. 101)

Summary of what shame and anger do:

Emotions like anger and shame do something in the relationship with others. Anger is a claim for dominance, which is “right” in cultures that emphasize entitlement and individual autonomy, right in cultures where people compete for the scarce good of honor, but “wrong” in cultures that emphasize kindness for all living creatures or harmonious relationships. Shame is a bid for inclusion, typically (though not always) by submission. This is right in cultures valuing the interdependence of people, but wrong in cultures that value independence and assertion. Right shame can take the form of propriety, or it can come with assertive claims for respect and precedence; wrong shame can be marked by hiding from sight and hoping others won’t notice you too much. Emotions are prevalent when they are right and rare when they are wrong. Is anger a healthy ingredient of every relationship? Is shame a self-destructive emotion?

The answer is: It depends. When the emotion is right by your culture, it is healthy; when it is wrong, it is often unhealthy. Not surprisingly, then, when psychologists study which emotions make individuals feel good in their lives, and be healthy, we find differences across cultures. Those emotions that help to achieve sociocultural goals are associated with higher subjective wellbeing and greater health. People who have emotions that are more typical for the average person in their culture also report greater subjective well-being. When we have emotions that support our cultural values, we feel better and we even do better.

The prevalence of anger and shame are different, their consequences are different, but can we conclude that anger and shame exist across cultures? We can, if we refer to the leanest of meanings—what philosopher Owen Flanagan refers to as “proto-anger” and “proto-shame”: emotions associated with assertion and avoiding exclusion, respectively. What we experience and do when we have an anger-like emotion is very different in a culture protecting self-esteem than in a culture protecting the relationship or a culture competing for honor, and justified anger is different from anger denied. Similarly, shame is different when it is of the self-deflating kind, or alternatively, of the relationship-restoring kind. Even if some prototype, some core relational themes (dominance, avoiding exclusion) can be recognized, anger and shame run very different courses across cultures, situations, and positions. It may be more appropriate, then, to speak of the plural “angers” and “shames” than to speak of the singular “anger” and “shame.” Yet is this phenomenon true only of “unpleasant” emotions? Wouldn’t we universally welcome and want “pleasant” emotions, such as love and happiness? Next, we will turn to those emotions. (p. 109)

On why love is a "right" emotion in WEIRD cultures:

Love is “right” in WEIRD cultures, because it individuates and elevates the loved one. This is most obviously true for romantic love, but it can also be true for maternal love. I remember loving my firstborn so much that I pitied the other mothers in the pediatrician’s waiting room for not having been as lucky with their babies. In my eyes, my little Oliver was the brightest and the most beautiful baby. It was only years later that I considered the possibility that my perception was part of the great love I felt for him. Love singles out and elevates one particular individual. In a culture that so dearly values the individual, love achieves the ultimate goal for individuals: to be united in mutual admiration, attraction, or longing. In these ways, love as we know it fits the cultural ethos of individualism that prevails in many Western cultural contexts.

Tenderness, empathy, and intimacy have always existed. But love as a private feeling for a unique person, love as a choice to be together, love as a source of self-esteem—that type of love may be a modern and Western invention. (p. 113)

On Chinese perception of love:

When love occurs outside of marriage, it may be drenched in sadness. In the 1980s Chineserespondents who sorted emotion words on similarity understood love as “sad,” and categorized it as part of the negative rather than the positive emotion family. In the country of Filial Piety, love had the potential to break down the proper respect and deference that children owed their parents. This may be one of the reasons that romantic love was devalued; interestingly, Chinese respondents describe love using more negative features such as pain, sadness, sacrifice, and loneliness than American respondents. (p. 114, reference: Shaver, Morgan, and Wu, "Is Love a 'Basic' Emotion?)

On why Ghanaians do not seek as many friends as they can:

Contrary to the intuition of many a student (and colleague), it is also not the case that individuals from so-called collectivist cultures seek more intimacy in relationships. To the contrary, individuals in tightly connected, interdependent relationship networks are more concerned about limiting the burdens of such interdependence than about seeking more intimacy and love.

Take an example from Ghana, where cultural psychologist Glenn Adams was struck by the caution about friends found in slogans, poems, and stories. A Ghanaian poem sounded:

Beware of friends.

Some are snakes under grass;

Some are lions in sheep’s clothing;

Some are jealousies behind their façades of praises;

Some are just no good;

Beware of friends.

Bumper stickers would carry such slogans as “Beware of bad friends.” And when random Ghanaian and U.S. American participants in public places (markets, parks) were asked by interviewers about their friendships, Ghanaian participants considered it normal to be cautious, or even suspicious about friends. In sharp contrast with American respondents, Ghanaians also declared the person having many friends to be foolish or naïve.

Why would Ghanaians not seek as many good friends as they could? The majority of Ghanaians (versus a small minority of Americans) understand friendships to mean that you offer material and practical support. This expectation from friends may be a liability against the background of resource poverty. Moreover, in a Ghanaian context, you need not seek friends to keep you company—company is always assured. And finally, there is always the possibility that friends take advantage of you or are not to be trusted. How different were Ghanaian views on friendship from American ones? Having friends was a good thing for Americans, who reported more trust in friendship relationships than did Ghanaians. Consistently, more American than Ghanaian participants reported that they had many friends, and the majority of Americans interviewed claimed that they had more friends than other people (only a minority of Ghanaian participants did so). Americans also described their friendships as closer than did Ghanaians. Friendship in American contexts meant emotional support and shared interest (spending a lot of time) first, and was also characterized by trust and respect. If having friends is good in American contexts, then not having friends is a sad thing. Americans thought that a person without any friends would be lonely and regrettable. In contrast, Ghanaians thought a person without friends was bad and wrong, not sad or regrettable. If friendship is about material support, then a person without friends is stingy and selfish.

In other words, individuals from Ghana were not as much concerned with assuring themselves of company (which they had already) as they were with being exploited, or with being harmed by kin. Again, this is not to say that close relationships are less valued, just that the “right” emotions focus on limiting the burdens of such relationships, rather than enhancing mutual affirmation, admiration, and belonging. (p. 118)

Short summary of love:

“I love you” is a fairly modern invention, but human relationships are not. No human being lives by themselves: we all need and value social relationships. But the “right” emotions, the emotions that regulate those relationships to the needs of the social context, are different. Love is right in an individualist culture, where autonomous individuals seek to connect. Amae and fago may be the right emotions in collectivist cultures where relationship partners seek to meet each other’s needs. In cultures where strong ties exist and people are inherently interconnected, individuals may be more focused on limiting the burden on themselves, or avoiding the burden on others. It cannot be ruled out that some form of love occurs in these cultures as well, but love is not “right” in the same way as it is in WEIRD cultures.

There are many kinds of “love,” all of which spin the connection between people. Nobody would confuse romantic love with parental love (and if they did, we would strongly condemn this confusion). But it is even more true when we look at collectivist cultures: emotions of connection do many different things, ranging from helping another person in need to making another person feel unique, from maintaining existing connections to procuring new ones, from providing another person with material resources to cherishing time together. Which emotion is “right” depends on the context. (p. 120)

On how happiness is valued differently across cultures:

In many cultures, though, the model is closer to Wang’s and the Daoist definition: happiness and unhappiness are intimately connected. My friend, the psychologist Mayumi Karasawa, told me that, growing up, her parents and teachers warned her against showing happiness about a good grade, because it would have disrupted her relationships with her classmates. Happiness, especially the proud and excited happiness that is so common among white Americans, does not serve the Japanese goal of maintaining good relationships, and is considered harmful. In the study described before, Japanese psychologists Yukiko Uchida and Shinobu Kitayama compared U.S. with Japanese conceptions of happiness and found that, in contrast to U.S. students, who saw their happiness as exclusively positive, Japanese college students routinely listed negative features of happiness: Happiness is “elusive,” because it never lasts, it is hard to put your finger on, and it is deceptive (distracting from reality). Happiness is “socially disruptive,” because it makes people inattentive to their environment and their obligations, and because it risks eliciting the envy or jealousy of others.

Negative interpersonal consequences make happiness an undesirable emotion elsewhere as well. I remember my own mother admonishing me that I should be acting normal, which in her words was “crazy enough.” Excited happiness was not valued in Amsterdam of the ’60s. My upbringing has seeped into the way I experience happiness as an adult. When my son Oliver’s baseball team played well (or the other team made mistakes in the his team’s favor), the happiness of the other mothers at the sideline seemed strong and undiluted. They cheered and celebrated without reservation. I too felt happy when my son’s team played well, but I would never have cheered in the same way, and in fact, I was concerned about hurting the feelings of the six- and seven-year-old boys on the other team, who also tried to play their best. My happiness was less blissful, and I was more reticent to cheer. This is just to say that we do not need to go to “exotic” cultures to find a different attitude towards — and a different experience of — happiness. (p. 125)

Summary of what emotions are correct for human flourishing:

As for positive psychology: we simply cannot assume that we know which emotions constitute flourishing in other cultures. Flourishing in Ghana may be better served by limiting love and establishing boundaries. Flourishing in Japan may be better served by self-improvement than by happiness. Flourishing among the Ifaluk may be better served by fago than by love. The emotions that contribute to flourishing differ by culture (and by position), depending on the relationships goals. And even if some form of love and some form of happiness are part of flourishing in some or most cultures, the modal types of love and happiness run very different courses. It may be better to speak of loves and happinesses in plural rather than love and happiness in singular.

A brief introduction to how language shapes emotions:

The emotion concepts of your language structure your experience. They are the tools that your parents use to help you make sense of ongoing events, including your own responses. They also prompt appropriate behavior. What if the emotion concepts vary across languages? And to what extent do we know this to be the case?

The first thing to know is that not all languages have a word for “emotion” itself. The category, as we think we know it, is historically new, and geographically unique. This is a problem, because it makes it harder to even know what concepts to compare across cultures. In some languages emotions are grouped with other sensations such as fatigue or pain, in others they are grouped with behaviors. The Turkish respondents in my word-listing study were an example of the latter, listing as emotions such behaviors as crying, laughing, helping, and yelling. The Himba in Maria Gendron’s research are another example of a community where behaviors are included in the category of emotions; they saw the communality of emotional faces in terms of behaviors (not mental states): “all laughing.” In deciding which emotions are different across cultures, it is important to realize that there is no universally shared way of drawing the boundaries around the domain of emotions. This makes the comparison across cultures all the more complicated.

Even without considering the difficulty of deciding what exactly counts as an emotion concept, it is clear from the outset that not all English words will have translations in other languages. Emotion vocabularies in some languages—such as Chewong in Malaysia—count as few as seven emotion words, and other languages count in the thousands, with English containing more than two thousand emotion words. There is no question, therefore, that languages organize the domain very differently, and make both different kinds as well as different numbers of distinctions.

Can we find good translations for the most important categories of emotion? Many languages fail to make the distinctions that seem obvious in English, such as those between anger, sadness, love, and shame. Some of the most central emotion concepts (as we distinguish them in English) share a word in other languages: for example, native speakers of Luganda, a language spoken in Uganda, use the same word, okusunguwala, for “anger” and “sadness.” Native Luganda interpreters had a hard time making the distinction between anger and sadness in English. Similar blends of anger and sadness are found in other languages. Turkish-minority respondents in my research in the Netherlands used kızmak to describe an anger that was permeated with sadness, and that typically occurred in intimate relationships in which high expectations had been disappointed. Kızmak does not come with aggression, but rather with ignoring or avoiding the other person. (p. 139)

On why, even if emotion concepts vary widely across languages, there nonetheless seem to be lots of similarities:

Some might argue that many languages have words for happy, calm, pride, love, angry, shame, fear, grief, disgust, envy, and perhaps a few other emotions. They are right. So, why would this be the case if emotion concepts refer to sets of cultural episodes? For one, the conditions of human lives are very similar in basic ways. As anthropologist Andrew Beatty concludes: “Because loving, getting, wanting and losing figure among any group of human beings, cradle to grave.”

An additional reason is that, given these human conditions, the logical possibilities of acting are limited. You can move towards or away from another human being or a group. Western scholars have proposed taxonomies in which “love,” “esteem,” “happiness,” and “interest” represent moves towards others (or as it may be, towards objects in the world), and “fear,” “contempt,” and “disgust” as moves away. College students from all over the world associate “joy” and its translations with moving towards and “shame,” “guilt,” and “disgust” with moving away. Emotion concepts may signify who does the moving. “Love” has been understood to mean moving towards another person. The Japanese emotion word of amae is (wanting) another person to move to you (though it is not just that). “Anger” has been understood as moving someone else away from you, and “fear” as you moving away from the other.

You can also be dominant (move up) or submissive (move down): anger (and its translations) signals you are up. Getting angry at my husband for being late is a power move; it shows I am “strong” (relative to what I could have been had I been sad, for instance). Pride also means you are up. Western adults (including some psychologists) turn this around, and infer pride from strong and dominant posturing in a situation of success. That inference is not universally justified. Fago comes with the acknowledgment that other people are weak, and need your protection. Shame, embarrassment, and perhaps sadness, mean you are down in the relationship. These concepts come with submission, or with the acknowledgment of being weak, at least relative to the other person in the relationship. Awe is another emotion where you are down in the relationship, this time by mere awareness of how small you are compared to a particular other, or to the environment at large. For awe, think of being in the audience of an extremely inspiring concert, or listening to a charismatic teacher or leader.

You can move closer or further away, be up or down. Yet another option is that you stay where you are. Some emotions describe just that: acceptance and calmness are examples, but so is depression. There are many reasons for not moving: You can be at ease with the environment (calm), open to anything that has, or would, come your way (acceptance), or not know where to move, even if you wanted to (depressed, hopeless). You can also “keep calm and carry on,” as the British say. But the movement is staying where you were, and the result is no immediate change in the environment—at least, no change that is initiated by you.

It does not take a scientist to come up with these emotional moves: they are the basic moves to be found in any relationship, and at this basic level, they will occur in all human societies and in other animals that live in groups (e.g., apes). Finding emotion concepts across the world that refer to these basic moves (or basic “episodes,” as I have labeled them above) should not surprise, because these are the logical possibilities of aligning oneself with the environment—in other words, this is how we live. Yet, even if we share these logical possibilities of relating to the world, we do not share universal emotion concepts. (p. 152)

(Include screenshot of diagram)

Summary of what emotional concepts are:

Emotion concepts are sets of cultural episodes that we have experienced, directly or by observation, supplemented with the cultural lore of an emotion category. And to the extent that people’s emotion lexicons and experiences differ across cultures, so will the emotional experiences that they distinguish. This is not a radically constructionist view: cultures cannot invent people’s emotions from the ground up. This is because all our emotions are situated within relationships between people, who themselves are confined by the bodies that make them up. Human relationships and human bodies have a lot in common across cultures, but they also allow for much variation. (p. 162)

On cultural humility:

The “clarity” and “competence” that mental health workers once sought has since been replaced by “cultural humility.” Rather than proliferating knowledge facts about the emotions and emotional disturbances of certain cultural groups as rigidly and narrowly defined by ethno-racial or national identities, mental health professionals have “embrace[d] uncertainty as a path to competence,” to quote one of the founders of cultural psychiatry, Laurence Kirmayer. The knowledge that emotional episodes can, and systematically do, differ across cultures should make therapists inquisitive: you should be aware that you do not know how another person is feeling, but this is all the more reason to want to find out. Embracing the uncertainty and following its path is not unlike the “unpacking of emotional episodes” that is practice among anthropologists. (p. 199)

On unpacking emotional episodes - screenshot of toolkit

How or why did what happened matter?

• Did it affect your self-esteem, your respectability, your purity, or status in the community, the respectability of your family or group?
• What are the goals, values or [role] expectations that are at stake?
• What are the social consequences of what happened likely to be?

What "emotion word" describes the episodes best, and what does this word mean (in the situation)?

• What word, words or expressions?
• Is it the "right" ("wrong") emotion to have in a situation like this?
• Does it help you to be the kind of person you (do not) what you to be?
• Does it help you to be the kind of person you (do not) want to be?
• What does it try to accomplish?
• How will others likely respond/contend with it?

What are the next steps in the dance?

• Are they described in emotional terms? Which?
• What do they try to accomplish? (What is the dance?)
• What will others' response likely be?

On not assuming or projecting understanding:

Importantly, you cannot assume that the way you would finish the dance is the most natural one. There is no such thing. Remember that Emiko, Hiroto, and Chiemi reported doing nothing in situations where they were offended. They came to terms with the offense, one way or another, and so did the majority of the other Japanese interviewees in that study (chapter 4). This was not suppressed anger: it was simply how their angry episodes evolved. They came to accept the situation, rather than working themselves up to moral indignation, or confronting the offender with the truth. Do not assume that a person who does not behave the way you expect is suppressing their authentic, real emotion. Ask. Don’t assume how the episode is ending, and is supposed to end. (p. 205)

On how emotional episodes vary for many different factors, not just cultural ones:

I am very certain that I will never be able to make a go-to reference manual on cultural differences in emotions; nor will anybody else. To grasp the absurdity of the task, ask yourself: How would I deal with the emotions of a Dutch person, any Dutch person? (Substitute, as you wish, “Catholic Irish American,” “white American from Boston,” “Japanese from Tokyo,” . . . for “Dutch.”) What emotions do they have? How to understand these emotions? What do these emotions look like in behavior? The answers to those questions would all depend on who the Dutch person is, what their history is, their gender and position in society, their specific predicaments. It depends on what they as an individual specifically care about at that moment, what the relational context is, and what specifically is at stake. It will also depend on whom they are interacting with, and what these people’s responses are.

This is true for any person with any ethno-racial or national background. I agree with anthropologist Andrew Beatty that there is no “good reason to expect cultural others to be less complex in their emotional and moral functioning than we take ourselves to be. . . .” and “anemotionally engaged ethnography will fail to deliver if it ignores particulars and assumes that the general frame is determinate or that everyone who fits the categorical profile will think, feel, and relate in the same way. With emotions, the devil is in the details.” (p. 206)

Final words on unpacking emotions:

Unpacking emotions in the heat of an emotional interaction is challenging. There is very little research on how to do it successfully, and yet, in our everyday lives, we take part in emotional interactions with partners who may not draw on the same repository, who might make different dance steps to a different musical genre. How to get in step?

There is no easy trick, but the OURS perspective on emotions that I have introduced does shed some new light on how to do it. A first suggestion is to not assume you know or understand others’ emotions. Instead, slow down, ask questions, and listen. In the field of mental health care, this is called an attitude of “not knowing” or “cultural humility.” Try to stop yourself from drawing fast conclusions based on your own perspective, and check if you understand what it means to your interaction partner, and importantly, sustain a positive relationship while you do. Remember, this is difficult for almost everyone and it takes sustained practice.

The second is to face up to your own feelings and acts. Remember that no emotion is any more “natural” than any other. There are no right and wrong emotions; there are only emotions that are right and wrong in a particular context, by particular standards. So, ask yourself what your own emotion wants to achieve, and how this may be different from the direction that your interaction partner’s emotion takes you. Ask yourself how you can act and feel differently. Can you find a dance that accommodates both? Can you end the emotional episode in a way that is right by both perspectives?

Even if your own way of doing emotions is the acceptable, normative one in a given context, ask yourself if other “dances” can be accommodated. Can we stop leading confidently and then question the other’s capacity to dance just because they do not follow our own dance?

Let us explore emotions across cultural boundaries (gender, ethnicity, class, and race) by listening and observing, by closely examining, and by not imposing our ways of understanding emotions as the true or “natural” way. Can our schools, business organizations, and courtrooms become flexible enough to accommodate some different understandings of emotion? This is the challenge and the opportunity for researchers and practitioners in the multicultural present and future. (p. 215 - 216)

Previous Post