Doing emotions: The role of culture in everyday emotions

ABSTRACT

Emotional experience is culturally constructed. In this review, we discuss evidence that cultural differences in emotions are purposeful, helping an individual to meet the mandate of being a good person in their culture. We also discuss research showing that individual’s fit to the cultural emotion norm is associated with well-being, and suggest that this link may be explained by the fact that normative emotions meet the cultural mandate. Finally, we discuss research that sheds light on some of the collective processes of emotion construction: social interactions and emotion representations are geared towards promoting emotions that are conducive to the cultural mandate. In conclusion, we suggest that individuals become part of their culture by “doing emotions” in a way that is consistent with the cultural mandate, and that in intercultural interactions, emotions can be literally “at cross purposes”: each person’s emotions are constructed to fit the purposes of their own culture.

KEYWORDS:

• Emotions
• culture
• social interactions
• well-being
• social construction

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Research Council of the University of Leuven under Grant OT13/050 to the first author, and The Research Foundation—Flanders (FWO) under Grant 12R3715N and Grant 12L7816N to the second and third author, respectively.