What are Emotions About? The Role of Cultural Values in Emotional Experience

It is general wisdom that emotions occur when situations are relevant to an individual’s values or concerns. However, empirical research tying emotions to values or concerns is scarce. The current presentation fills this gap. First, I will present evidence that an individual’s daily emotional experiences tend to be about the values or concerns that are generally considered important in his or her cultural context. Second, I will present data suggesting that the type of the experienced emotion can be predicted from the type of value that is relevant to the emotional situation. More specifically, the relevance of self-focused values is associated with the experience of disengaging emotions; the relevance of other-focused values is associated with the experience of engaging emotions. We suggest that some cultural differences in emotions can be understood from differences in central cultural values.status: publishe