How Do Culture and Emotion Shape Each Other?

Situations, expressions, valued feelings and the social life of emotion.

Level: Intermediate
Reading load: 8 core readings in 5 units
Prerequisites: The Culture & Psychology foundation, or familiarity with culture as learned meanings, practices and settings. Basic understanding of a sample and an experiment. The comparison-methods path is useful preparation; specialist knowledge of emotion science is not required.
Last reviewed: September 2026

Introduction

A feeling seems to belong wholly to the person who feels it, yet its occasion, meaning, and expression may be deeply relational. What counts as a slight, which joys are prized, and when restraint is expected are questions about a cultural world as well as an individual life. Studying them requires us to distinguish experience, expression, recognition, emotional goals, and regulation.

This path begins with a framework for the cultural construction of emotion. Studies of how people interpret events and the situations in which feelings arise then make its proposed processes more specific. Two contrasting approaches to facial expressions show how stories, alternatives and emotion words enter a comparison. Research on valued feelings and suppression separates emotional goals from regulatory actions and their interpersonal consequences. The final reading asks how a person’s emotional pattern relates to local patterns and to the quality of relationships.

The eight readings combine theory, interviews, comparative tasks and an interaction experiment. The most demanding analyses ask how feelings are measured and whether the effects of suppressing emotion differ across settings. Their guides explain the comparisons that support each conclusion. The aim is to assess claims about commonality and variation without turning sampled groups into fixed types. By the end, you should be able to specify which aspect of emotion a study measures, identify the cultural process it proposes, and design a comparison that could challenge its explanation.

Unit 1 of 5

What would a cultural explanation of emotion explain?

Begin with a framework that connects people’s interpretations to recurring interactions and shared practices. Treat collective goals and emotional functions as claims to examine. Cultural influence can be investigated without assuming that every member of a community feels alike.

Reading
1 of 8
The Cultural Construction of Emotions
Mesquita, B., Boiger, M., & De Leersnyder, J. (2016). The cultural construction of emotions. Current Opinion in Psychology, 8, 31–36. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.copsyc.2015.09.015
Foundational argument · Major synthesis · Accessible · Full work: 6 pages
Map the proposed connections among cultural practices, situations, appraisals and emotional responses.
Why you’re reading it. Establish several possible points at which cultural processes might enter an episode, rather than treating culture as one background variable.
A question to consider. For an emotion following public criticism, which part of this framework could you vary or observe to distinguish two competing explanations?

Unit 2 of 5

How do meanings and situations shape emotional experience?

Mesquita examines components of recalled emotional episodes among people living in the same country. Boiger and colleagues shift attention to which situations are thought to occur and invite emotion. Together they separate the meaning of an event from the distribution of events people encounter.

Reading
2 of 8
Emotions in Cultural Contexts
Mesquita, B. (2001). Emotions in collectivist and individualist contexts. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 80(1), 68–74. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.80.1.68
Methodological contribution · Moderate · Full work: 7 pages
Track concerns, appraisals and readiness to act as distinguishable components of the reported episodes.
Why you’re reading it. Turn the opening framework into measurable parts before asking how situations are distributed.
A question to consider. If two interviewees report equally intense anger but different beliefs about what the event means, what would an intensity-only measure miss?
Reading
3 of 8
Condoned or Condemned: The Situational Affordance of Anger and Shame
Boiger, M., Mesquita, B., Uchida, Y., & Barrett, L. F. (2013). Condoned or condemned: The situational affordance of anger and shame in the United States and Japan. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 39(4), 540–553. https://doi.org/10.1177/0146167213478201
Methodological contribution · Moderate · Full work: 14 pages
Compare judgments of a situation’s frequency with judgments of the emotion it could elicit, and inspect the less consistent predictions.
Why you’re reading it. Test the idea that cultural organization affects emotional life partly through recurring situations.
A question to consider. How would you combine event diaries with vignette ratings to separate exposure to criticism from interpretations of criticism?

Unit 3 of 5

What do facial-expression tasks establish?

These works ask related questions using different populations and procedures. Ekman and Friesen use translated stories and supplied photograph choices; Gendron and colleagues vary emotion-word cues in a sorting task. Compare what each design permits participants to communicate, including evidence of commonality as well as variation.

Reading
4 of 8
Constants Across Cultures in the Face and Emotion
Ekman, P., & Friesen, W. V. (1971). Constants across cultures in the face and emotion. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 17(2), 124–129. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0030377
Landmark empirical study · Moderate · Full work: 6 pages
Identify how the stories, selected photographs and response alternatives define agreement in this study.
Why you’re reading it. Understand the evidential basis of an influential universality argument before evaluating a different way of asking the question.
A question to consider. What conclusion would remain justified if participants matched the supplied story successfully but described the same face differently without a story?
Reading
5 of 8
Perceptions of Emotion From Facial Expressions Are Not Culturally Universal
Gendron, M., Roberson, D., van der Vyver, J. M., & Barrett, L. F. (2014). Perceptions of emotion from facial expressions are not culturally universal: Evidence from a remote culture. Emotion, 14(2), 251–262. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0036052
Critical reappraisal · Methodological contribution · Moderate · Full work: 12 pages
Compare sorting with and without emotion words, including similar groupings that do not settle their emotional meaning.
Why you’re reading it. Examine how a task’s conceptual cues can affect the evidence used to argue for universal recognition.
A question to consider. What would a study need to hold constant to attribute a contrast with Ekman and Friesen specifically to response format?

Unit 4 of 5

Which feelings do people value, and what follows when they regulate them?

Wanting an emotion and changing its expression are different processes. Tsai and colleagues introduce ideal affect; Butler and colleagues examine suppression in social interaction. Keep their measured cultural variables separate from the variables actually manipulated. Later evidence in the guides qualifies static group contrasts.

Reading
6 of 8
Cultural Variation in Affect Valuation
Tsai, J. L., Knutson, B., & Fung, H. H. (2006). Cultural variation in affect valuation. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 90(2), 288–307. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.90.2.288
Foundational argument · Methodological contribution · Moderate · Full work: 20 pages
Distinguish desired activation from reported feeling and examine the support for the proposed measures and group comparisons.
Why you’re reading it. Introduce emotional goals that may help explain choices without assuming that preferences directly determine behavior.
A question to consider. If a community increasingly reports valuing calm, what additional evidence would show that its everyday emotional practices have changed?
Reading
7 of 8
Emotion Regulation and Culture: The Social Consequences of Suppression
Butler, E. A., Lee, T. L., & Gross, J. J. (2007). Emotion regulation and culture: Are the social consequences of emotion suppression culture-specific? Emotion, 7(1), 30–48. https://doi.org/10.1037/1528-3542.7.1.30
Methodological contribution · Moderate · Full work: 19 pages
Separate habitual suppression, assigned suppression and measured values, then compare responsiveness, hostility and affiliation outcomes.
Why you’re reading it. Show why a regulatory strategy’s effects may depend on its social setting and why some costs can remain across settings.
A question to consider. How could a follow-up vary the meaning of concealing emotion while holding the outward behavior as similar as possible?

Unit 5 of 5

What does emotional fit tell us about relationships?

The final study relates individual emotional patterns to a local reference group. Return to the opening framework: similarity might help coordination, but relationships might also create similarity. Evaluate these possibilities without treating conformity as a prescription.

Reading
8 of 8
Emotional Fit With Culture and Relational Well-Being
De Leersnyder, J., Mesquita, B., Kim, H., Eom, K., & Choi, H. (2014). Emotional fit with culture: A predictor of individual differences in relational well-being. Emotion, 14(2), 241–245. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0035296
Methodological contribution · Moderate · Full work: 5 pages
Follow the construction of the fit score and the comparison between relationship-focused and self-focused situations.
Why you’re reading it. Connect cultural patterns with individual variation and relational outcomes while keeping the direction of influence open.
A question to consider. What repeated-measure design could distinguish emotional fit improving a relationship from a supportive relationship gradually increasing fit?

Scope and omissions

This path examines cultural processes in emotional episodes, perception, goals, regulation and relational fit. It includes conceptual synthesis, interviews, vignette and sorting tasks, measurement research and an experiment. Eight core works total 89 published pages.

The samples and research traditions remain selective. Several works share a research programme, and US–East Asian comparisons are prominent; the Netherlands and sampled Fore and Himba communities broaden the questions without representing whole regions. Country, ethnicity, language, values and local relationships are not interchangeable measures of culture. The path is not a comprehensive ethnography of emotion, an account of all bodily mechanisms, a developmental course or a treatment guide. Power, emotional labor, migration and change deserve further attention beyond these introductory selections. Optional works extend recognition, regulation and acculturation and revisit the evidence for affect valuation and emotional fit.

Synthesis

Emotional life unfolds among the situations people meet, the meanings they give events, the feelings they value, and the responses their relationships invite. Through interaction, people also sustain or change these practices. The readings give this reciprocal account forms that can be investigated. Many causal connections remain open; making them explicit is part of understanding how culture and emotion shape one another.

The strongest interpretation of a comparison begins with its measurement. A story-to-photograph match, a sorted pile, a retrospective feeling rating, a desired state and a partner’s response answer different questions. Similar outcomes need not carry identical meanings; different outcomes need not imply wholly different emotional systems. Neither a broad cultural label nor a statistically adjusted association supplies a mechanism by itself.

For a final synthesis, choose one episode such as receiving public praise. Specify an appraisal, an expression, a desired feeling and a possible regulation strategy. Propose two accounts of how a local practice shapes the episode, then design evidence that could distinguish them. Include variation within the setting and identify an observation that would change your interpretation.

To examine the comparative assumptions behind these designs, continue with How Can We Compare Psychological Processes Across Cultures?. For a wider account of motivation and emotion, follow How Do Biological Systems Shape Motivation and Emotion?.

To examine how shared expectations and organized settings sustain or change behavior, continue with How Do Cultural Norms and Institutions Organize Behavior?.