We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
To save content items to your account,
please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies.
If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account.
Find out more about saving content to .
To save content items to your Kindle, first ensure no-reply@cambridge.org
is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings
on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part
of your Kindle email address below.
Find out more about saving to your Kindle.
Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations.
‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi.
‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
Culture lies at the heart of emotion. Emotions are primarily relational processes that shape and are shaped by our relations with other people. Social life is the stage on which our emotions acquire significance and meaning. Cultures vary with respect to the relational, interpersonal themes that are promoted in social life. Some cultures emphasize the importance of maintaining one's independence and autonomy in social relations. Social interactions in other cultures are centered around the avoidance of conflict and the maintenance of harmony. Yet, other cultures promote the protection of reputation and face as a central interpersonal concern. This diversity in relational concerns across cultures should influence emotional processes in important ways, from the situations that most commonly are the object of emotional experiences to the ways in which emotions are communicated to others.
In this chapter, we address the question of how culture shapes emotion. We present a theoretical approach that aims to “unpackage” the role of culture in emotion. One of the major challenges that the rapidly developing field of culture and emotion faces is quite simply how best to explain cultural variation in emotion. “Unpackaging” here refers to the importance of including measures of culture-related variables in (cross-) cultural studies on emotion. We believe that cultural variation in relational concerns is central to understanding and explaining cultural variation in emotion.
Recommend this
Email your librarian or administrator to recommend adding this to your organisation's collection.