7.3. The cultural context of emotional communication.

Emotions are important to our happiness and well-being. Therapeutic work with disturbed or ill patients often centers on bringing a balance to their emotional life and helping them learn to accept and regulate emotions. As people we often ask about the emotional well-being of those that are close to us or people we come in contact with at work. Even the simple “how are you doing” that is so common in American vernacular is an inquiry into the emotional well-being of the person we greet. Perhaps one reason we ask is that we cannot always tell from facial expressions alone the emotional well-being of others. Moreover, the fact that such inquiries are ubiquitous strongly suggests the central role of emotions in our psychological life.

Emotions are precisely suppressed because they convey in powerful ways the psychological state of our inner that is less regulated by culture. The role of psychotherapy is focused on helping the patient to freely express important emotions, and learning how to appropriately convey this information to others in their lives. The utilization of training or counseling groups as vehicles for therapy and communication are aimed at teaching participants to express feelings appropriately and at the same time learn to listen more carefully to the emotional expressions of others. Recognizing emotions accurately is considered an important way to improve communication in industrial work groups. The underlying idea is that communication between people is disrupted unless participants feel free to convey their impressions and feelings honestly and are sensitive to the feelings of relevant others.

Culture impacts the conceptualization of emotions and the regulation and expression of emotional responses. However, although not all cultures have a word for emotion members of all societies manage to convey emotional feelings (Russell, 1991). Still as we saw in chapter 5 language places limits on our understanding by the presence or absence of words that convey finer points in conceptualization. Cross-cultural understanding may depend on the presence or absence of language to convey our emotions and thoughts. Cultures conceive of emotions and regulate the display of expressions in different ways necessitating sensitivity in cross-cultural communication. The fact that emotions are conceived differentially and are dependent on cultural values in turn shapes our behavior and our emotional life.

The varying focus on the self and relationships in individualistic and collectivistic cultures is one important cross-cultural difference. In the Western world emotions are considered self-relevant subjective experiences that tell us important information about our status and self-defined goals. Other cultures centers emotional meaning in the relationship between people. In collectivistic cultures emotions are often explained in terms of relationships to significant others in the family or work place, rather than being defined in personal subjective reactions as in individualistic societies. These cultural differences in understandings suggest that emotion conceptions are not invariant but constructed by the individual over the course of socialization

Kitayama, Shinobu and Markus (1994) explained the cultural shaping of emotional life as determined in part by the ideology of society that defines what is good and moral. Ideology is sifted through the customs and norms of society and enforced by the educational system, legal principles, and norms of social interaction. The salience of the core cultural ideas is produced through experience in the home, in education, work settings, and in religious communities. These cultural influences all combine to produce habitual ways of expressing emotions with concomitants in human physiology, in the expressions of facial responses, and in our subjective feelings. Culture also impacts the specific actions related to our emotions. This comprehensive model understands emotional life by examining the collective context (including linguistic concepts) expressed in the economic and sociopolitical system. Culture also has lasting influences on emotional expression from the largely unconscious processes shaped by norms and social institutions. Nearly all societies encourage the positive emotional expressions that define cultural identity. However, people are also individuals and even in the most regimented and conformist society personal dispositions also contribute to emotional expression.

As noted the biological basis of emotions has been found everywhere and emotions tend to be produced by similar antecedent events in all cultures. Cultures however, determine to a large extent the way emotions are experienced through the appraisal process that is culturally dependent, and through display rules that determine how emotions may be expressed in the company of others. Culture also affects emotional life through the presence or absence of linguistically relevant concepts. The basic emotions that are ubiquitous should be thought of as a template upon which culture write more specific meanings through socialization, norms and social institutions. The universality of the basic emotions does in no way contradict the important role of culture in defining the specific emotional experience that is culturally dependent.