BETWEEN US

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.