How Universal Are Our Emotions?
There’s nothing like migration to reveal how things that seem natural may be artifacts of culture.
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.
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.
There’s nothing like migration to reveal how things that seem natural may be artifacts of culture.
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.
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.
The New Yorker
How Universal Are Our Emotions?
Psychologists have argued that affect is profoundly shaped by culture. They shouldn’t feel so confident.