Emotions are culturally situated

Several years ago I was involved in an interview study that compared emotions in North American and Japanese contexts (Mesquita et al., 2006). The interview schedule contained such common questions as “What was the intensity of your emotion?” The Japanese respondents were dumbfounded by this question, and we had to change it. What I now understand is that emotions, as they exist in Japanese contexts, are not located within any single person, but rather emerge within an interaction between people. Since emotions are contextualized and considered to be primarily a property of the relationship, a question that asks for the qualification of an internal state, such as that on emotional intensity, does not fit the Japanese understanding. This example illustrates some fundamental differences in Japanese and Western conceptualizations of emotion, and makes it clear that Klaus Scherer’s approach to emotions is closer to the Western view. His definition of emotion as “an episode of interrelated, synchronized changes in the states of all or most of the five organismic subsystems in response to the evaluation of an external or internal stimulus event as relevant to major concerns of the organism” (p. 679) contains a number of assumptions derived from the Western emotion model. The first is that emotions take place within the individual (“changes in organismic subsystems”) rather than transcending the individual level. A second is that the utility of emotions is best described at the level of the individual (“the major concerns of the individual”), rather than at that of the relationship. The third assumption is that emotion is best characterized in terms of the synchronization of within-person processes, rather than being attuned to, for instance, relationship outcomes. The fact that Scherer’s definition so closely reflects Western assumptions about emotions gives reason for pause. I applaud Scherer’s laudable effort to come to a definition of emotion and to describe the variety of emotional experiences in terms of appraisal characteristics. However, I do suggest that a viable conceptualization of emotion must account for emotional events as they are conceived of and experienced in a wider range of cultural contexts.status: publishe