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The cultural construction of emotions

Article in Current Opinion in Psychology · April 2016

DOI: 10.1016/[Link].2015.09.015

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 The cultural construction of emotions

Batja Mesquita, Michael Boiger, & Jozefien De Leersnyder

University of Leuven, Belgium

To appear in: Current Opinion in Psychology

Batja Mesquita, Michael Boiger, & Jozefien De Leersnyder: Center for Social and Cultural

Psychology, Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences, University of Leuven,

Tiensestraat 102 – box 3727, 3000 Leuven, Belgium. Email: mesquita@[Link],

[Link]@[Link], [Link]@[Link].

Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Batja Mesquita, Center for

Social and Cultural Psychology, Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences, University

of Leuven, Tiensestraat 102 – box 3727, 3000 Leuven, Belgium. Email:

mesquita@[Link]
 Abstract

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 towards how people from different cultures ”do” emotions and

away from which emotions they “have”.

(109/100-120 words)

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

2
 Anthropological and psychological research on emotions has yielded ample evidence

suggesting that emotional experience is culturally constructed [for reviews, see 1,2–4]. First,

the most frequent and intense emotions differ by cultural context [e.g., 5], and in each context

central emotions are those that help individuals to be a good person and act in desirable ways.

For instance, anger helps individuals to achieve personal goals, and therefore tends to be more

frequent in cultures that collectively value individual goal pursuit compared to cultures that

are organized around interpersonal harmony [5–7]. Similarly, the contents and connotations of

particular emotions fit cultural meanings, and help to achieve cultural goals [e.g., 8,9,10]. For

instance, happiness is a personal hedonic experience in the U.S., where it signals and helps to

achieve success; in comparison, happiness has social and ambivalent elements in Japan,

rendering it more conducive to harmony-focused relationships [8,see also 11,12]. In addition,

the patterns of emotional experience appear to be culturally normative: When people reported

their emotions in particular situations (on 20-30 emotion scales), individuals’ patterns of

emotions fit the average pattern of their own cultural group better than they fit the average

pattern of other cultures [13]. The situations in these studies were standardized across

cultures, meaning that there are cultural differences in the typical profiles of emotional

responses to particular types of situations. Whether the patterning of emotions also reflects

differences in culturally central goals is an empirical question that has not yet been addressed.

Second, experiencing culturally normative emotions is associated with higher well-

being and lower symptom reporting. This is true both in studies that theoretically stipulate

these normative emotions [5], and in studies that infer the normativity of an individual’s

emotions based on their fit with the cultural average [14–16]. In sum, individuals in a wide

range of cultures benefit from experiencing culturally normative emotions; one possible

explanation is that these emotions help individuals towards achieving ‘collective

intentionality’, i.e., the “power of minds to be jointly directed at objects, matters of fact, states

3
of affairs, goals, or values” [17]. Culturally normative emotions enable people to navigate the

intricacies of their social environments in a coordinated fashion. This may also be the reason

why these (patterns of) emotions occur at higher frequency and intensity. In the remainder of

this review, we will summarize recent research showing how emotional experience is actively

constructed by processes at both the collective and the individual level, which, in unison,

achieve collective intentionality.

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

[18–20]. For example, Tsai and her colleagues showed that best-selling children’s storybooks

in Taiwan portray more calm than excited smiles, in line with the cultural task of adjusting to

others, whereas North American storybooks typically portray their main characters with

excited rather than calm smiles, in line with the task of influencing environments [19, Study

2]. Thus, in each culture, children’s books modeled the emotions conducive to the central

cultural tasks. Similarly, religious texts and religiously inspired self-help books [21] have

been shown to model emotions that are conducive to achieving the culturally valued tasks in a

particular culture.

Individuals also select, or even construct, products that afford culturally valued

emotions in others. When given a choice between different sympathy cards, European

American compared to German students chose cards that can be thought to promote more

positive and less negative emotions in others [22]. European Americans encouraged positive

emotions (and the “can do” mentality that they ensue) that promote both the achievement and

4
the mastery goals that are characteristic of a North American frontier mentality; Germans

allowed for more negative emotions as those are more suited for the more pronounced

concern with harmony and fitting in [see also 23].

Cultural promotion (or avoidance) of certain emotional states also happens in social

interactions. Indeed, cross-cultural research on anger and shame supported the idea that the

typical interactions in a culture promote emotions that fit the respective collective

intentionality [6,18,24]. In one study [6], Japanese and North American students read

vignettes describing interactions that had been reported to elicit anger and shame by previous

samples of Japanese and American students. For each vignette, the respondents judged how

frequent this type of interaction occurred in their culture, and how much anger or shame it

would elicit. Cross-culturally, the interactions thought to be most frequent were those that

elicit culturally normative emotions; the least frequent interactions were those that elicit

culturally condemned emotions. Anger was normative in the U.S., where it presumably

promotes autonomy and independence, and undesirable in Japan, where it presumably violates

the goal of relational harmony. Conversely, shame was normative in Japan, where critical

self-reflection is thought to realize the ideal of relational harmony, and undesirable in the

U.S., where it is thought to undermine the value of positive self-regard. In subsequent studies,

we replicated this pattern in Turkey [24] and Belgium [18]: In all of these cultures,

interactions that elicited culturally normative emotions were seen as frequent, whereas

interactions that elicited culturally condemned emotions were perceived to be rare. Normative

emotions in all these cases fostered the cultural values and goals, whereas condemned

emotions ran against collective intentionality.

Only few studies observed how exactly interactions align individuals’ emotions with

the collective intentionality of their culture. The clearest examples come from field studies on

parenting practices: Parents instill socially valued emotions in children who show norm-

5
inconsistent behavior [25,26], and thus encourage their children to act according to the

pertinent cultural norms and social structures. For example, Röttger-Rössler and colleagues

found that, in response to children’s norm violations, the Bara (Madagascar) use beating to

instill strong experiences of fear (tahotsy) and the Minangkabau (Indonesia) use social

exclusion strategies to instill shame-like emotions (malu). Fearful emotions (felt towards the

sanctioning authorities such as elders) are functional for the Bara context, where society is

segmented and hierarchical; shameful emotions are more suitable for maintaining smooth

relations in the more stratified Minangkabau society, where social harmony is the goal.

Parents thus use socially valued emotions to override other, less desirable, emotions and

behaviors.

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 instance, American and Japanese participants remembered situations of

success and failure differently [27]. American participants attributed success to themselves

and failure to others; Japanese participants attributed success to themselves as well as the

situation and failure to themselves. Accordingly, in success situations, Americans experienced

pride, a feeling that is conducive to the cultural norm of self-enhancement, whereas Japanese

felt lucky, which is compatible with the cultural norm of self-criticism [see also 32].

Differences in attribution served the respective collective intentionality.

Individuals also play an active role in constructing emotional experience from

interoception as well as from cognitive and behavioral contents [33,34]. We recently

6
examined the types of experiences most typically associated with anger and shame across

three different cultures: the U.S., Belgium, and Japan [35]. In this study, participants indicated

for a range of carefully selected anger and shame situations, their appraisals and action

tendencies as well as anger and shame intensity. Appraisals and action tendencies are two

aspects of emotional experience often distinguished by emotion theorists [36,37]: Appraisals

are the different ways people interpret events and action tendencies reflect people’s

motivation to act upon them. We used a bottom-up classification program to identify types of

participants who shared a pattern of appraisals/action tendencies that they associated with

intense anger or shame. This means that we had no a priori classification in mind, but let the

program infer classes of people based on their responses to the appraisal and action readiness

items across the various anger and shame situations. The program inferred three person types

for anger and two for shame. Although all person types occurred in every culture, the most

frequent types of anger and shame in each culture were those that appeared most conducive to

central cultural tasks. For example, the Japanese type of anger (55% of the Japanese

respondents were classified under this ‘person type’) hurts the relationships with others least

—nodding and smiling is a prominent response, and so is rumination, whereas an American

‘person type’ for anger (43 % of North Americans) was strongly associated with both blaming

the other person and giving them a piece of your mind. One way of understanding these

findings is that individuals in each culture foreground those experiences that are important to

performing their cultural tasks.

Cultural differences in the types of phenomena recognized to constitute an emotion

itself point to a process of cultural construction in the service of performance of cultural tasks.

Several studies have found emotions in the United Sates to be understood as arising from the

individual, but in Japan as arising from the relationships between individuals [38,39]. These

differences in conceptualization are important to both experience and perception. Japanese

7
athletes reported more emotions when they described their relationship with others than did

American athletes. Japanese respondents also perceived more emotions in athletes who were

surrounded by others than did American respondents [38]. Moreover, in several emotion

perception studies in which participants judged a target person’s emotions [40,41], Japanese

used the surrounding people’s facial expressions to establish the target person’s emotions, but

Westerner did not. For instance, Japanese judged the smiling target to be less happy if the

surrounding people portrayed angry or sad expressions.

That cultures differ in what constitutes an emotion is also suggested by experimental

research that primed either the individual self or a family member, and then measured positive

emotions during an amusing film or upbeat music [42]. European Americans rated their

emotions as more intense after the individual-self prime, whereas Asian American considered

their emotions as more intense after the family prime. In each culture, experiences that were

essential to the cultural mandate were foregrounded, and in a consequent emotion-eliciting

task recognized as emotions. One way to understand these findings is that in each culture

emotions are constructed based on information that is most consequential to agency. Agency

in European Americans is based within the individual, whereas agency in Asian Americans

may be grounded in the family or group [43] (see also Markus, this special issue).

Complementary evidence for the idea that different ways of constructing emotions reflect

differences in agency comes from recent studies on emotion perception in the Himba, a

remote culture in Namibia. The Himba construct emotional behaviors in the face not as

primarily subjective feelings, but rather in terms of what is going on in the environment [42].

An explanation is that agency in this culture is based on situational prescriptions, rather than

located within the individual.

Recent neuro-scientific research on emotion similarly points to a process of cultural

construction: An fMRI-study with Chinese, Asian American, and European American

8
participants recorded different correlates of emotion during emotional film clips [44]. The

mean intensity of reported emotions, the cardiac arousal, and the magnitude of BOLD signals

were all similar across cultures. However, cultural differences existed in the relative

association of ventral and dorsal activity of the anterior insula (AI) with feeling strength. In

Chinese, feeling strength was associated more with activation of the ventral than the dorsal

AI; in European Americans, feeling strength was associated more with activation of the dorsal

than the ventral AI; and feeling strength in the bicultural East-Asian American group showed

an intermediate pattern of activation, with brain activity equally divided between the ventral

and the dorsal AI. The study is consistent with the idea that cultural learning influences the

types of information selected or highlighted when “constructing” emotional feelings [4,44–

46]; we would expect that the selection is driven by the particular tasks (goals for action)

within a particular culture. It is unclear as yet how these particular selections serve the

particular goals for action within the respective cultures. The authors propose that Chinese

relied on dorsal AI, because monitoring autonomic changes provides better clues about

culturally valued low arousal states; in contrast, they suggest that European Americans tapped

the ventral AI for somatosensory cues that may matter more for the culturally valued

expressivity of emotion.

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 & Geeraert, this special issue). These changes are likely

brought about by both collective and individual-level processes. The data with immigrants

9
suggest that engagement in a culture plays an important role in the cultural construction of

emotions. Moreover, they suggest that cultural construction happens throughout life, and is

not restricted to early socialization. People’s emotions thus continue to be updated, providing

the individual guidance on how to act in the current environment throughout the life span.

Conclusions and Directions for Future Research

The combined research on cultural differences suggests that emotions emerge through

processes of construction [48–51]. 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 ‘have’. Culture, then, becomes a framework within which

people jointly and collectively do emotions: In interactions and collectives, people construct

those emotions that help them achieve ‘collective intentionality’. Future research should map

the precise ways in which people in different cultures jointly and collectively do emotions,

thus providing insight in the social mechanisms underlying cultural differences in emotions.

10
 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.

11
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Annotations

15
*[3; Mesquita, De Leersnyder, & Boiger, 2015]

This chapter comprehensively reviews the psychological and anthropological literature on the
cultural constitution of emotion. It discusses what cultural variation in the experience and
regulation of emotion means for various theoretical accounts of emotion and shows how
culture-specific moralities affect emotional experience.

*[6; Boiger, Mesquita, Uchida, & Barrett, 2013]

This empirical paper shows that cultural differences in the experience of anger and shame in
the United States and Japan emerge from different “situational affordances” in these two
cultures: A first study found that people encounter social situations frequently to the extent
that they elicit condoned emotions (anger in the U.S., shame in Japan) and rarely to the extent
that they elicit condemned emotions (shame in the U.S., anger in Japan). A second study
identified systematic cultural differences in the kinds of situations considered most powerful
to elicit these emotions.

*[18; Boiger, De Deyne, & Mesquita, 2013]

This empirical paper finds that people’s cultural worlds in the U.S. and Belgium are
structured to afford and reflect emotional patterns and emotional responses that are consistent
with the respective cultural goals. Three studies show that social situations, children’s books,
and the shared cultural meanings in associative language networks all promote and highlight
culturally beneficial emotions while avoiding and containing culturally harmful emotions.

*[22; Koopmann-Holm & Tsai, 2014]

This empirical paper is among the few to study how real-world objects in different cultures
highlight and give rise to different emotions. In a series of studies, the authors show that
American compared to German expression of sympathy reflect a desire to avoid negative
affect and achieve positive affect. For example, American sympathy cards were more likely to
avoid negative feelings compared to German cards and contained more positive content.

*[24; Boiger, Güngör, Karasawa, & Mesquita, 2014]

This empirical paper extends previous research on the situational affordances of anger and
shame to a comparison of two interdependent cultural contexts – Japan and Turkey. Based on
an analysis of the cultural concerns of face and honor, the authors predicted and found that
emotions that are beneficial for defending honor (both anger and shame) are afforded
frequently in Turkey, whereas emotions that are helpful for keeping face (shame but not
anger) are afforded frequently in Japan. Moreover, differences in the affordance of anger and
shame also depended on the specifics of the situation in terms of gender and interpersonal
closeness.

**[26; Röttger-Rössler, Scheidecker, Jung, & Holodynski, 2013]

This empirical paper reports ethnographic field studies with the Bara of Madagascar and the
Minangkabau of Sumatra, and reveals the role of emotions in promoting norm-consistent
behavior in children. In each culture, emotions associated with culturally valued action
tendencies are induced in children, especially upon norm violations. The Bara elicit fear and

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 anger in their children, thus preparing them for life in a hierarchical tribe with many inter-
tribal conflicts; the Minangkabau instill shame, which helps to achieve relational harmony.
The normative caregiver techniques used in these cultures to elicit the desired emotions would
conflict with Western standards.

*[44; Immordino-Yang, Yang, & Damasio, 2014]

This empirical article shows that neural processing of emotions in the brain, more specifically
the anterior insula (AI), varies between cultural groups. The intensity of emotional experience
to admiration and compassion-inducing narratives was associated with dorsal AI activity in
American participants but with ventral AI activity in Chinese participants; bi-cultural East-
Asian Americans displayed an intermediate pattern of activation, with brain activity equally
divided between the ventral and the dorsal AI. The article provides strong evidence for a
cultural shaping of the brain’s ability to construct emotional experience.

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