Take a moment and imagine you are traveling in a country you’ve never been to before. Everything—the sights, the smells, the sounds—seems strange. People are speaking a language you don’t understand and wearing clothes unlike yours. But they greet you with a smile and you sense that, despite the differences you observe, deep down inside these people have the same feelings as you. But is this true? Do people from opposite ends of the world really feel the same emotions? While most scholars agree that members of different cultures may vary in the foods they eat, the languages they speak, and the holidays they celebrate, there is disagreement about the extent to which culture shapes people’s emotions and feelings—including what people feel, what they express, and what they do during an emotional event. Understanding how culture shapes people’s emotional lives and what impact emotion has on psychological health and well-being in different cultures will not only advance the study of human behavior but will also benefit multicultural societies. Across a variety of settings—academic, business, medical—people worldwide are coming into more contact with people from foreign cultures. In order to communicate and function effectively in such situations, we must understand the ways cultural ideas and practices shape our emotions.
Historical Background
In the 1950s and 1960s, social scientists tended to fall into either one of two camps. The universalist camp claimed that, despite cultural differences in customs and traditions, at a fundamental level all humans feel similarly. These universalists believed that emotions evolved as a response to the environments of our primordial ancestors, so they are the same across all cultures. Indeed, people often describe their emotions as “automatic,” “natural,” “physiological,” and “instinctual,” supporting the view that emotions are hard-wired and universal.
A model of a Neanderthal
Universalists point to our prehistoric ancestors as the source of emotions that all humans share.
The social constructivist camp, however, claimed that despite a common evolutionary heritage, different groups of humans evolved to adapt to their distinctive environments. And because human environments vary so widely, people’s emotions are also culturally variable. For instance, Lutz (1988) argued that many Western views of emotion assume that emotions are “singular events situated within individuals.” However, people from Ifaluk (a small island near Micronesia) view emotions as “exchanges between individuals” (p. 212). Social constructivists contended that because cultural ideas and practices are all-encompassing, people are often unaware of how their feelings are shaped by their culture. Therefore emotions can feel automatic, natural, physiological, and instinctual, and yet still be primarily culturally shaped.
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