Both linguistic and psychological constructionist approaches to emotion research recognize the crucial role of language in shaping emotion experience and communication. Multilingual individuals navigate multiple languages, and often multiple cultures, making it essential to understand how emotions are perceived, processed, experienced, and communicated in first and later learned languages. This chapter reviews previous findings from linguistics and psychology, shedding light on the complex and multifaceted relationships among emotion, language, and culture. While it is clear that multilinguals perceive, process, experience, and communicate emotions differently across their various languages, the chapter outlines possible directions for future research to further explore the impact of multilingualism and multiculturalism on emotions.

This chapter examines the bi-directional relationship that exists between the menopause and society. It reflects on how a woman’s perception of the menopause is influenced by societal and cultural ideas about menopause, ageing and gender. It reviews how Western societal attitudes towards the menopause have developed over time, in response to scientific developments and medical trends. It also considers the viewpoint that this natural life transition has been over medicalised, and looks at how this life stage is viewed in other cultures. The chapter looks at how an individual woman’s experience of the menopause has an impact on her wider society. It considers the impact that menopausal symptoms can have in the workplace, and in personal relationships including partners, children and other family members. It also speculates about how health economics are affected by women in this life stage.

This chapter explores the foundations from which cultural variability in emotion emerges by providing a theoretical framework to query degrees of universality for different emotion components. We first review two dominant approaches in affective science that diverge on the extent to which culture is deemed central for emotion: the basic emotions approach and the psychological constructionist approach. Then we apply Norenzayan and Heine’s hierarchical system of cultural universals to the empirical literature on cultural variation in two components of emotion: felt experience and nonverbal expression. In reviewing representative sets of findings, we suggest that while some aspects of emotional experience may be existential universals, nonverbal expressions may reflect functional universals. Our chapter emphasizes the interplay between biological preparedness and cultural learning in shaping emotions. To enable fruitful discussions between scholars of varied research traditions, we advocate for a common set of criteria to evaluate cultural similarities and differences in emotion.

This chapter documents how cultural variation in emotion is not arbitrary, but follows a “cultural logic.” It examines how cultural models of independence and interdependence – along with their associated interpersonal goals and focus – co-occur with the emotions people both value (their ideal affect) and actually experience. For example, people in independent cultures (e.g., the United States) tend to value high arousal positive states like excitement more, and report socially disengaging emotions like anger more than people in interdependent cultures (e.g., East Asia), who tend to place greater value on low arousal positive states like calm and more frequently report socially engaging emotions like shame. These differences emerge across every level of the cultural cycle: in individual behaviors, social interactions, institutional practices, and broader cultural ideas. The chapter highlights how these cultural logics shape various aspects of life, including social judgments, resource sharing, and well-being. and concludes by outlining a roadmap for future research.

In this chapter, we review emerging evidence on cultural differences in emotion regulation by featuring three key aspects. First, cultural contexts influence what people want to feel (i.e., emotion goals). Second, cultural contexts shape the means with which people try to change their emotions (i.e., emotion regulation strategies). Third, cultural contexts guide the extent to which people attend to emotions. Furthermore, cultural contexts influence the association between emotion regulation and well-being. Engaging in emotion regulation valued within one’s cultural contexts tends to be associated with better well-being and health, whereas engaging in devalued emotion regulation tends to be associated with poorer well-being and health. These findings on cultural differences in emotion regulation and their consequences for well-being and health provide insight into how cultural meaning systems shape individuals’ emotional experiences.

Deficits and excesses in emotional experience and behavior are central transdiagnostic features of mental illness. This chapter examines how culture shapes the impact of mental illness on emotional functioning. It draws on insights from clinical psychology, affective science, and cultural psychology, and identifies areas ripe for integration and interdisciplinary work. Despite differences in levels of analysis, target populations, theories, and methodologies, these fields are united in their efforts to understand how people interpret bottom-up changes (e.g., subjective reports of emotions and symptoms, physiological reactivity) using top-down categorical judgments that are consensually shared within local cultural contexts (e.g., culturally salient forms of distress). These processes in turn shape experiences of distress. It synthesizes empirical research to examine how patterns of emotional functioning give rise to both culturally divergent and convergent experiences of mental illness, with implications for both the treatment of mental illness and mental health education.

This chapter builds on the premise that emotions are relational acts: they reveal partners’ intentions and are geared toward relationship goals. Given that these goals differ across cultures, the emotions that arise and unfold during couples’ interactions – particularly during conflict – also differ. For example, in cultures that emphasize autonomy in relationships, annoyance is commonly experienced, whereas in cultures that prioritize harmony, empathy and validation are prevalent. This chapter explores how cultural ideals for “good” relationships shape not only which emotions are felt and expressed, but also how partners respond to each other’s and regulate their own emotions in ways that support those ideals. Finally, the chapter highlights evidence suggesting that couples are most satisfied with their relationships when their emotions align with culturally valued relationship goals. It concludes by discussing gaps in the literature and offering recommendations for future research.

This introductory chapter outlines the central premise of The Cultural Shaping of Emotion: Emotions vary across cultures in meaningful ways as they are shaped by the meanings and practices of the social worlds we inhabit. It introduces working definitions of both “emotion” and “culture” and reviews the historical debate between universalist and constructionist approaches to emotion. It advocates for a nuanced view that can accompany the reader throughout the rest of the book. This first chapter also situates the book’s next eleven chapters in three parts that explore i) a cultural logic to emotion; ii) how cultural differences in emotions come about; and iii) emotion dynamics in multicultural societies. As such, it sets out a coherent narrative for understanding how culture and emotion shape one another. In closing, it sketches how we can employ this book’s insights via a “culturally-informed not-knowing approach” in both research and daily life.

This chapter documents a cultural logic to the content of emotions, linking cultural models of agency to different emotional conceptualizations, appraisals, and connotations. The authors argue that emotions can either be conceptualized as originating from within the individual, aligning with a disjoint model of agency, or as emerging from social interactions, reflecting a conjoint model of agency. They further show how cultural differences in both the magnitude and relevance of appraisals align people’s emotional experiences with their cultural context. Specifically, experiences of happiness, anger, and awe, are found to come in different variants, implying that the “same” emotion can be associated with slightly different appraisal patterns. By relying on the Natural Semantic Metalanguage research approach, the chapter finally highlights some likely universal and highly cultural specific aspects of emotion experience. The chapter concludes by suggesting future research directions, including the integration of cultural neuroscience and the analysis of emotions in social media.

When people move to another culture, their emotions may not “fit” because these were socialized to align with values and goals central to their culture of origin. However, with increasing cultural engagement, immigrant minorities’ emotions may change and, eventually, come to fit the normative emotions in the new/other culture. This chapter reviews the emerging research on emotional acculturation and argues that emotional fit with culture may be an important (understudied) condition for the inclusion of immigrant minorities. Specifically, it presents evidence showing that (1) minorities’ emotions change over time given frequent intercultural contact and friendships; (2) these changes occur independently of acculturation attitudes; (3) emotional fit with the majority culture does not jeopardize fit with the heritage culture; and that (4) emotional acculturation may benefit minorities’ well-being and inclusion in the majority culture. In closing, the chapter outlines directions for future research to advance understanding of emotional acculturation.

In this reflective afterword, Shinobu Kitayama traces how our understanding of culture and emotion has shifted from viewing emotions as biologically hard-wired to understanding them as dynamically shaped by culture. It articulates four themes as emerging from the edited volume The Cultural Shaping of Emotion: emotion as situated cultural practice, the centrality of meaning-making, emotion development as cultural apprenticeship, and the dynamic interplay between biology and culture. In sketching pathways for the future, Kitayama calls for an integrative approach that studies emotions as rooted in cultural meanings and practices as well as in biological processes. He also calls to study emotions beyond East–West dichotomies such that we can move toward a globally informed and inclusive science of emotion.

How did language emerge? It has been suggested that language developed through mimicry of the sounds of nature and animals. Some propose that speech arose from grunts and groans, gestures, dance, or music. Others believe that language has more divine origins. A number of scientists speculate that language appeared spontaneously in our species, while opposing theories say that language evolved over a very long period of time. And which was the original language anyway? It makes sense that the question of how language emerged has been called “the hardest problem in science.” All of that being said, researchers don’t always agree as to what constitutes language. It’s generally accepted that communication differs from language in that the latter involves the use of symbols and syntax. For this reason, some argue that language is uniquely human. Others think our hominin relatives may have had speech as well. Animals have their own versions of communication too, while there are always quirky news stories about talking birds, signing chimpanzees, and even monkeys that use grammar. What are we to make of these claims? Let’s look at who has language and how it emerged.

Study of the material remains of Greek and Roman antiquity played a key role in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century emergence of the modern disciplinary formation of Classics as the comprehensive study of the ancient Mediterranean world. Over the same period, it was also central to the development of racial thought in the spheres of aesthetics, ethnology, and historical anthropology. After articulating a conception of race that, following Stuart Hall and Noémie Ndiaye, treats it as a ‘sliding signifier’ drawing upon an archive or repertoire of racial tropes, this chapter discusses how, in studying Greek and Roman monuments under the sign of ‘art’, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century scholarship attended to material antiquity in a manner that was both formed by and formative of constructions of race emerging between the ‘Age of Discovery’ and the European ‘Enlightenment’. It explores the relation of classical art historiography to other racializing discourses of difference along three key axes: ‘Culture’, ‘Differentiation’, and ‘Beauty’, attending to the role of environmental or climate theory, heredity, and physiognomy in emerging theories that sought to explain the diversity of ancient and modern peoples as evidenced by their visual and material productions.

Ancient theories of human diversity and identity strongly influenced most modern forms of scientific racism, including eugenics, tropicalism, craniometry, environmental theories of human development, social evolutionary theories, and theories connecting ‘race’ and intelligence. This chapter explores three of these areas of influence: (1) environmental determinism; (2) models of evolution and the ‘progress’ of civilisations; and (3) population management schemes linked to eugenic thinking. These ideas spread throughout Europe as part of the Enlightenment project to classify everything and throughout much of the globe under the influence of European imperialism and colonialism culminating in the Nazi eugenics program. But this chapter focuses on developments in the United States, the country that pioneered the colour-based bioracism that still dominates contemporary racist thinking between 1870 and 1930, the years when the ‘science of man’ became academic and political dogma.

Staging the cultural consequences of a new metropolitan modernity, the 1920s were shaped around two massive fields of experience: on the one hand, the passage from utopian expectancies of the immediate postwar period (1918–1923) to peacetime socio-cultural normalizing (1923–1929); on the other hand, the new urban sensibility, with all of its exuberance and anxieties. Darkly shadowing each was the long-lasting trauma of the Great War: the pall of the war-dead and the war-disabled; the management of human catastrophe and personal loss. Each also produced extraordinary creativity across the arts and intellectual life. Across Europe, the brashness of big-city life underscored the urban–rural divides, creating a new topography of the imagination. Resulting debates pitted the religious against the secular, the traditional against the modern. This chapter maps the European variations in organized religion; in churchgoing and vernacular faith-related practices; and in the growing separation of belief and belonging. In notably spectacular form, Bolshevik Russia in the 1920s exemplified each of these themes.

Located across a large swath of land in the north of Australia, the Gulf Country has a history encompassing lives where race has featured predominantly. In the context of European colonization from around the mid nineteenth century, relations between people who have become known colloquially as Whitefellas and Blackfellas have been central to the region’s society, cultural mix, and economy. As understood in everyday language, Whitefellas are known to have no Aboriginal ancestry, while Blackfellas are descended from forebears belonging to one or more of the Indigenous language groups connected to traditional lands.

A novel approach of this book is its reliance on experimental evidence primarily drawn from well-controlled comparisons between completely illiterate and literate individuals, highlighting the mind-enhancing powers of reading. To properly interpret this evidence, it is necessary to clarify the evolving definitions of literacy and often inconsistent terminology used to describe individuals with varying literacy levels.

Chapter 13 COLLECTIVE SKILLS, PRACTICES, AND CULTURAL INNOVATION argues that, in order to make sense of the possibility of cumulative culture, we ought to distinguish between collective skills and individual or group skills. I argue that practices are partly grounded on cognitive states of agents, rather than entirely on individual and collective dispositions, if cumulative culture is possible. Collective intelligence is explained in terms of a theory of collective skills as productive practices.