Are Human Emotions Hard-Wired, Pre-Cultural and Universal?

This post is a review of Between Us: How Cultures Create Emotions. By Batja Mesquita. W.W. Norton & Company. 290 pp. $28.95

When they learn that a beloved relative is terminally ill, members of Buddhist families in Thailand have been socialized to avoid thinking about or expressing their feelings. And to accept the outcome, calmly, and with detachment. This practice, Batja Mesquita points out, is the opposite of “grief work,” an approach to trauma and loss common in Western societies, based on the premise that suppressing anger and sadness makes individuals feel bad about themselves and impedes close relationships with others.

Source: Engin Akyurt/pixabay

Because they value independence and autonomy, Mesquita also notes, shame gets a bad rap from most Americans. Confronted with what they regard as rejection and humiliation, they become anxious, depressed, or angry. By contrast, Japanese and Taiwanese, who value interdependence, view shame as a virtue rather than a sign of weakness. Individuals engage in public displays of shame and self-criticism to demonstrate that they respect the opinions of others and know their place in society.

In Between Us, Mesquita, a Professor of Psychology at the University of Leuven, Belgium and fellow Psychology Today blogger, draws on fieldwork by anthropologists, recent studies by social psychologists, and her own personal and professional experiences in countries around the world, to argue that emotions — including happiness, sadness, disgust, fear, anger, and love — “do not have universal signatures.” They vary, “depending on the specifics of the interactions, relationships, and cultures in which they play out.”

In a sense, Mesquita’s analysis is reminiscent of centuries’ old descriptions of distinctive national cultures, hot-tempered Italians, emotionally repressed Scandinavians, and inscrutable Chinese. Rigorous and empirically based, Between Us makes a compelling case, useful to clinicians as well as scholars, that emotional events have relational as well as inner components.

That said, Mesquita does not always address issues that might qualify her thesis. For example, she does not adequately assess the impact of ethnic, racial, and gender-based subcultures within nation states. Or the extent to which the globalization of culture reduces differences between the cradle-to-grave emotional experiences of individuals in the 21st century.

Not all languages, Mesquita acknowledges, have a word for “emotion.” Some important categories for emotions fail to convey distinctions (e.g., between anger and sadness) that seem obvious in English. When a corresponding word is available, the relevant categories appear to differ across cultures. Some languages even fail to distinguish between the colors green and blue. These challenges, Mesquita claims, risk projecting English language interpretations onto emotions. Less convincing is her suggestion that they could lead to an underestimation — and not an overestimation — “of the cultural differences in emotion lexicons.”

Mesquita understands that these days, “nature is no longer contrasted with nurture; it is equipped for nurture.” Nonetheless, she implies at times that emotions are culturally learned and not biologically given, universal, or invariant. The subtitle of Between Us, after all, is “how cultures create emotions.” We experience emotions, Mesquita writes, “because they are instilled in us by our parents and other cultural agents.” If “the most important part of emotion is what happens between people,” then the “inner feelings are irrelevant.” The stories or scripts attached to emotions “are the emotions.” It is appropriate and necessary, she implies, to generalize about what the stories or scripts have in common, but not about the “inner feeling” of, say, fear when a shark is about to take a bite out of a person’s leg.

And so, it seems to me, a precept embraced by the great Argentine writer Jorge Borges may be usefully applied to studies of emotions (and just about everything else): “To think is to forget a difference, generalize, make abstractions.”

Mesquita concludes her provocative book with a reminder that unpacking emotions is challenging — and there is not much credible guidance from clinicians or researchers about how to do it successfully. She is surely right, moreover, that the place to begin is by asking questions about the ways in which the emotion that has surfaced has been expressed, understood, and received.