1 Deconstructing the Emotions For the Sake of Comparative Research

2 What types of cross-cultural variations in “feelings and emotions ” are we able to imagine, given our understanding of what it means to be a “person ” (that is, a mentally endowed human being)? And what types of evidence on mental functioning in other cultures would we want to collect to convince us that those imaginable (and hence logically conceivable) variations in “feelings and emotions ” are actually real? What predictions, if any, follow from the idea of having an “emotional ” life? And what predictions, if any, follow from the idea of having a mental life organized by some particular emotion, such as “sadness”, “envy”, “guilt ” or “love”? I suspect those questions are unavoidable in a scholarly discipline such as cultural psychology, which aims to develop a credible account of psychological differences acros