An astute psychological study of emotions around the world.
Emotions have long been considered internal feelings common to all humans. Not so, according to this insightful analysis.
Born and raised in Holland, a professor in the U.S. for 20 years, and now the director of the Center for Social and Cultural Psychology in Leuven, Belgium, Mesquita has learned that her emotions—or anyone’s emotions—are not part of some kind of universal default. As the author shows, outside of WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic) cultures, “talking about our emotions as internal experiences is quite exceptional in the world. People in many cultures talk about emotions as more ‘public, social, and relational’…as acts in the social and moral world.” In other words, “emotions are OURS as much as they are MINE.” For skeptical readers, Mesquita delivers a few interesting jolts. We take for granted that expressing emotions is psychologically healthy. Even non-Freudian experts agree that suppressing one’s feelings leads to neuroticism, misery, or worse. Yet it turns out that “authenticity”—expressing one’s inner feelings—is a virtue in WEIRD society and almost nowhere else. In much of Africa and Asia, it’s a sign of immaturity. “Calmness is a preferred emotion in a culture that expects you to put the group’s needs above your own,” and this is largely the norm outside the West. In Buddhist teachings, expressing negative feelings exacerbates them, so mature adults remain detached in the face of suffering or frustration. Mesquita maintains that much scientifically confirmed psychology does not survive exposure to other cultures. “Bridging cultural differences in emotions,” she writes, “will require you to do the hard work of unpacking the emotional episodes….Unpacking emotional episodes means to humanize the people who live through them.” Countless words regarding emotions fail to translate across language barriers. For example, Japanese employs the same word for shame and embarrassment, and Polish lacks a word for disgust.
An astute psychological study of emotions around the world.Pub Date: July 19, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-324-00244-4
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: April 26, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2022
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our...
A psychologist and Nobel Prize winner summarizes and synthesizes the recent decades of research on intuition and systematic thinking.
The author of several scholarly texts, Kahneman (Emeritus Psychology and Public Affairs/Princeton Univ.) now offers general readers not just the findings of psychological research but also a better understanding of how research questions arise and how scholars systematically frame and answer them. He begins with the distinction between System 1 and System 2 mental operations, the former referring to quick, automatic thought, the latter to more effortful, overt thinking. We rely heavily, writes, on System 1, resorting to the higher-energy System 2 only when we need or want to. Kahneman continually refers to System 2 as “lazy”: We don’t want to think rigorously about something. The author then explores the nuances of our two-system minds, showing how they perform in various situations. Psychological experiments have repeatedly revealed that our intuitions are generally wrong, that our assessments are based on biases and that our System 1 hates doubt and despises ambiguity. Kahneman largely avoids jargon; when he does use some (“heuristics,” for example), he argues that such terms really ought to join our everyday vocabulary. He reviews many fundamental concepts in psychology and statistics (regression to the mean, the narrative fallacy, the optimistic bias), showing how they relate to his overall concerns about how we think and why we make the decisions that we do. Some of the later chapters (dealing with risk-taking and statistics and probabilities) are denser than others (some readers may resent such demands on System 2!), but the passages that deal with the economic and political implications of the research are gripping.
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our minds.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-374-27563-1
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
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IN THE NEWS
The Stoics did much better with the much shorter Enchiridion.
A follow-on to the author’s garbled but popular 48 Laws of Power, promising that readers will learn how to win friends and influence people, to say nothing of outfoxing all those “toxic types” out in the world.
Greene (Mastery, 2012, etc.) begins with a big sell, averring that his book “is designed to immerse you in all aspects of human behavior and illuminate its root causes.” To gauge by this fat compendium, human behavior is mostly rotten, a presumption that fits with the author’s neo-Machiavellian program of self-validation and eventual strategic supremacy. The author works to formula: First, state a “law,” such as “confront your dark side” or “know your limits,” the latter of which seems pale compared to the Delphic oracle’s “nothing in excess.” Next, elaborate on that law with what might seem to be as plain as day: “Losing contact with reality, we make irrational decisions. That is why our success often does not last.” One imagines there might be other reasons for the evanescence of glory, but there you go. Finally, spin out a long tutelary yarn, seemingly the longer the better, to shore up the truism—in this case, the cometary rise and fall of one-time Disney CEO Michael Eisner, with the warning, “his fate could easily be yours, albeit most likely on a smaller scale,” which ranks right up there with the fortuneteller’s “I sense that someone you know has died" in orders of probability. It’s enough to inspire a new law: Beware of those who spend too much time telling you what you already know, even when it’s dressed up in fresh-sounding terms. “Continually mix the visceral with the analytic” is the language of a consultant’s report, more important-sounding than “go with your gut but use your head, too.”
The Stoics did much better with the much shorter Enchiridion.Pub Date: Oct. 23, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-525-42814-5
Page Count: 580
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: July 30, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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