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.
Are human emotions universal or culturally specific?
Cultural studies of emotions
While emotions themselves are universal phenomena, they are always influenced by culture. How emotions are experienced, expressed, perceived, and regulated varies as a function of culturally normative behavior by the surrounding society.
Are emotions biological or cultural?
Some researchers view emotion as a universal construct, and that a large part of emotional experience is biologically based. However, emotion is not only biologically determined, but is also influenced by the environment.
What are cultural constructs?
By definition, “Cultural constructions are arbitrary in that they are created and maintained by each culture, cultural constructions are not fixed forever rather they are dynamic and change over time.
How does culture affect emotions?
However, culture also influences emotion in various ways. Culture constrains how emotions are felt and expressed in a given cultural context. It shapes the ways people should feel in certain situations and the ways people should express their emotions.
How can culture affect people’s emotions?
Cultural scripts dictate how positive and negative emotions should be experienced and displayed; they may also guide how people choose to regulate their emotions, ultimately influencing an individual’s emotional experience. Cultural contexts also act as cues when people are trying to interpret facial expressions.
Are emotions understood across cultures?
Research on cultural differences in the decoding of emotions generally concludes that so-called basic emotions, which include both anger and sadness, are indeed recognized across cultures at above chance levels (Elfenbein and Ambady, 2002; Hess and Thibault, 2009).
What are emotional display rules?
Emotional display rules refer to cognitive representations of what individuals believe they should do with their facial expressions when feeling specific emotions in particular social situations (Matsumoto 1990, 1993).
What are the three parts of all emotions?
Emotional experiences have three components: a subjective experience, a physiological response and a behavioral or expressive response. Feelings arise from an emotional experience.
Are emotions biological?
Based on years of research, early emotion scientists gravitated towards a theory of universality: Emotions are innate, biologically driven reactions to certain challenges and opportunities, sculpted by evolution to help humans survive.
Do cultural constructs change?
Culture is a dynamic construct that changes over time, through generations of life experiences.
Social constructionism is a theory of knowledge that holds that characteristics typically thought to be immutable and solely biological—such as gender, race, class, ability, and sexuality—are products of human definition and interpretation shaped by cultural and historical contexts (Subramaniam 2010).