The cultural psychology of emotion

Abstract 120 words Since Darwin’s time, many scholars have seen emotions as a functional adaptation to social living (Ekman, 1992; Oatley & Jenkins, 1992; Tooby & Cosmides, 1990, 1992). Emotions signal the occurrence of pressing social problems or opportunities and provide heuristics for successful behavior (Oatley & Jenkins, 1996). One of the prime reasons that emotions have likely evolved is to monitor and negotiate our social relations. These social relations vary across cultural contexts. Human beings do not live in uniform worlds. Therefore, their emotions are not, or not most of the time, responses to universal emotional events. Human emotional behavior is not aimed at achieving general, universal goals. Rather, human beings always live in specific environments. As the anthropologist Geertz puts it: “People who are independent of time, place, and circumstance do not now and have not ever existed, and by the very nature of things could not exist.…becoming human is becoming individual, and one become