How Universal Are Our Emotions?
Psychologists have argued that affect is profoundly shaped by culture. They shouldn’t feel so confident.
For Mesquita, this is an instance of a larger, overlooked reality: emotions aren’t simply natural upwellings from our psyche—they’re constructions we inherit from our communities. She urges us to move beyond the work of earlier researchers who sought to identify a small set of “hard-wired” emotions, which were universal and presumably evolutionarily adaptive. (The usual candidates: anger, fear, disgust, surprise, happiness, sadness.) Mesquita herself once accepted that, as she writes, “people’s emotional lives are different, but emotions themselves are the same.” Her research initially looked for the differences elsewhere: in the language of emotion, in the forms and the intensity of its expression, in its social meaning.
Over time, though, her conviction began to weaken. “What would it mean that emotions are the same?” she asks.
Two models of Emotions
OURS Model: Instead of seeing emotions as bequeathed by biology, we might see them as learned: “instilled in us by our parents and other cultural agents,” or “conditioned by recurrent experiences within our cultures.” In this model of emotions, they are “OUtside the person, Relational, and Situated”—ours.
MINE Model: In “Inside Out,” a little girl, Riley, is shown as having a mind populated by five emotions—Joy, Sadness, Fear, Disgust, and Anger—each assigned an avatar. Anger is, of course, red. A heated conversation between Riley and her parents is represented as similar red figures being activated in each of them. “Inside Out” captures, with some visual flair, what Mesquita calls the mine model of emotion, a model in which emotions are “Mental, INside the person, and Essentialist”—that is, always having the same properties.
Highly abstract questions such as “What is meaning?,” he said, tend to “produce in us a mental cramp. We feel that we can’t point to anything in reply to them and yet ought to point to something.” He went on, “We are up against one of the great sources of philosophical bewilderment: a substantive”—a noun—“makes us look for a thing that corresponds to it.”
Read the full article here.
Further Readings:
Batja Mesquita book Between Us: How Cultures Create Emotions
Bernard Williams book Shame and Necessity