This chapter makes the case for a robust conception of agency within emotional experience, challenging the traditional view of emotions as passive. Emotions are not simply endured but enacted; they are best understood as forms of spontaneous, reason-responsive engagement that express an agent’s evaluative stance towards their situation. Drawing on Jean Moritz Müller’s account of emotional spontaneity and expanding it through Richard Moran’s concept of the practical stance, the chapter develops a view of emotions as modes of situated responsiveness that manifest a person’s commitments and concerns. It is argued that the emotion-constitutive agency involves capacities to construe and formulate an evolving response to the agent’s existential situation. Moreover, emotions are shown to be not just reflective of the agent’s vulnerabilities but also mediums through which vulnerability is inhabited, negotiated, and at times resisted.

This chapter focuses on increasing flexibility in self- and emotion-patterns, suggesting a process-oriented and patient-oriented perspective on psychopathology and psychotherapy. Such an approach can take into account the notions of affective atmosphere and the importance of external environmental factors, including social processes, in the treatment of psychiatric disorders. The notion of a self-pattern as a dynamical gestalt allows for a systematic approach to understanding and treating such disorders. Specifically, it allows us to zoom in on the affective factors that include emotions, constituted as their own dynamical patterns, to discover the connections among the various features of self-pattern, and the pervasiveness of the affective in everyday life.

Emotions and motivation are tied intimately together. Some motivations are based in emotions: fear, anger, and disgust. In other cases, though not forming their bases, emotion strongly interact with motivation; for example, disgust can strongly interact with sexual and feeding motivations. The chapter asks – what are the general properties of emotion and what do all emotions have in common? Emotions serve functionally coherent roles in behaviour, conscious experience, cognition, and the organization of the body’s physiology. The chapter draws a distinction between emotion, affect, and mood. It discusses specific action tendencies and Fredrickson’s broaden-and-build theory of positive emotions. The chapter places central importance upon affective neuroscience. It reviews the evidence for seven basic affective systems as postulated by Jaak Panksepp: seeking, fear, rage, lust, care, panic/grief, and play. Links are described between these basic emotional systems and high-level cognition.

Chapter 1 argues that two major changes in the long eighteenth century brought questions about literary sensorimotor imagery to the fore: first, the blending of classical models of rhetoric with modern philosophical theories about how the mind moves; and second, the proliferation of reproducible printed illustrations. In the first case, because the passions were explained by the flow of humours and animal spirits or the vibration of nerves, emotion was motion in essays on criticism. Dennis, Kames, and Johnson promoted sensorimotor models of reading and writing that, even as pamphlets and periodicals increasingly satirized mind-in-motion models, continued to wield enormous explanatory power in theories about human agency and creativity. In the second case, serpentine line illustrations in works by Cavendish, Hogarth, and Sterne demonstrate how printed images were not only visual cues but also embodied proprioceptive prompts inviting readers to imagine their bodies in motion.

Humans are emotional beings that reason, not reasoning beings that occasionally experience emotions. In fact, emotions are essential to good decision-making. In the world of big data and machine learning, the human potential for emotions can influence the way machine learning systems are developed and deployed and also influence the way they are perceived and used. The two manifestations of emotion that can influence decision-making are bias and noise, both of which have emotional undertones. In this chapter, I consider the impact of emotion, bias and noise and suggest a way to acknowledge and measure their impact in the realm of machine learning and big data.

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 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.

Culture and emotion are two of the fundamental mechanisms for human adaptation to the natural and social environment. Culture provides informational resources that help a human population adapt to environmental regularities, whereas emotion provides informational resources that help adaptation to environmental perturbations. In this chapter, we speculate on micro-to-macro cultural dynamics under societal threats, namely, when a population experiences recurrent large-scale perturbations. We first piece together individual-level micro-cultural dynamics under societal threat – encoding, storage, and transmission of cultural information when a large proportion of a population is threatened with potential adverse effects by natural challenges, such as extreme weather events and pandemics, or by social challenges, such as wars and conflicts. We then speculate how these processes may give rise to macro-level cultural dynamics under recurrent societal threats by transforming cultural scripts to cope with societal challenges.