Elsevier

Current Opinion in Psychology

Volume 8, April 2016, Pages 31-36
Current Opinion in Psychology

The cultural construction of emotions

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.copsyc.2015.09.015Get rights and content

Highlights

  • Culturally normative emotions help individuals to achieve important cultural tasks.

  • Having culturally normative emotions is associated with greater wellbeing.

  • Typically occurring interactions with others promote culturally normative emotions.

  • Individuals from different cultures construct emotions out of different information.

  • The emotions of immigrants exposed to a new culture acculturate.

A large body of anthropological and psychological research on emotions has yielded significant evidence that emotional experience is culturally constructed: people more commonly experience those emotions that help them to be a good and typical person in their culture. Moreover, experiencing these culturally normative emotions is associated with greater well-being. In this review, we summarize recent research showing how emotions are actively constructed to meet the demands of the respective cultural environment; we discuss collective as well as individual processes of construction. By focusing on cultural construction of emotion, we shift the focus toward how people from different cultures ‘do’ emotions and away from which emotions they ‘have’.

Section snippets

Cultural construction of emotions: processes at the level of the collective

To the extent that emotions help to perform culturally central tasks (examples are being unique or maintaining harmonious relationships), they will be afforded and promoted. One way through which collectives promote normative emotional states is by emphasizing them in the cultural products that people engage with. Several studies compared the emotions depicted in children's books in different cultures and found them to differ in meaningful ways [18•, 19, 20]. For example, Tsai and her

Cultural construction of emotions: individual-level processes

Individuals seek out situations that foster emotions that are useful to culturally central tasks [22•, 27, 28] in the same way that they cultivate emotions that are useful to other types of tasks at hand [29, 30]. However, cultural construction of emotions goes beyond either seeking out desired emotions or avoiding condemned emotions. When encountering similar situations, people in different cultures also appraise these situations in ways that help them to fulfill their cultural tasks. For

Emotional acculturation

The emotions of people who move to another culture change. This is suggested by research showing that the emotional fit of immigrants to their new culture is predicted by the exposure they have had to that culture: the number of years spent and the number of contacts with majority members of the new culture [15, 47•]. We have not yet examined the nature of the changes in detail, but would expect that emotional patterns change to better fit the ideals and values of the new culture (see Ward and

Conclusions and directions for future research

The combined research on cultural differences suggests that emotions emerge through processes of construction [48, 49, 50, 51]. Emotions are iterative and active constructions that help an individual achieve the central goals and tasks in a given (cultural) context. Adopting a perspective of action means that the research naturally shifts to the ways cultures afford and constrain how people ‘do’ emotions, and away from culture as a one-time socializing force that shapes the emotions people

References and recommended reading

Papers of particular interest, published within the period of review, have been highlighted as:

  • • of special interest

  • •• of outstanding interest

Acknowledgements

Preparation of this article was facilitated by grants from the Research Council of the University of Leuven and the Research Foundation Flanders to Batja Mesquita, a postdoctoral fellowship by the Research Foundation Flanders to Michael Boiger, and a postdoctoral short-term grant by the University of Leuven to Jozefien De Leersnyder.

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