Between Us: How Cultures Create Emotions

"Here, Mesquita—joining her sometime co-author Lisa Feldman Barrett and other contemporary constructionists—enlists linguistic data to undermine the universalist view of emotions...Japanese, Mesquita points out, has one word, haji, to mean both 'shame' and 'embarrassment'; in fact, many languages (including my own first language, Tamil) make no such distinction...The Bedouins' word hasham covers not only shame and embarrassment but also shyness and respectability...The Ilongot of the Philippines have a word, bētang, that touches on all those, plus on awe and obedience...It gets worse."

"Arguing that 'we primarily have emotions in order to adjust to changes in our relationship with the (social) world,' the author uses social psychology and eye-opening case studies to examine the cultural, political, and economic factors that influence what people feel...Mesquita lays out two ways of thinking about emotions: MINE ('Mental, INside the person, and Essentialist') and OURS ('OUtside the person, Relational, and Situated')...She suggests that Western cultures tend to take the MINE approach while OURS predominates everywhere else, and she cites a study that found Japanese Olympic athletes emphasized the relational aspect of emotions more than their American counterparts in interviews...Exploring how parents instruct children in emotional norms, Mesquita describes how Minangkabau people in West Sumatra shame kids when they break a norm and how Bara people in Madagascar teach the young to fear displeasing ancestral spirits so that the children comply with authority...The bounty of case studies captivates and makes a strong argument that social conditions have the power to dictate how one expresses and experiences emotions...The result is a bracing and bold appraisal of how feelings develop."

"People in many cultures talk about emotions as more "public, social, and relational"…as acts in the social and moral world'...In other words, 'emotions are OURS as much as they are MINE'...For skeptical readers, Mesquita delivers a few interesting jolts...We take for granted that expressing emotions is psychologically healthy...Mesquita maintains that much scientifically confirmed psychology does not survive exposure to other cultures...Countless words regarding emotions fail to translate across language barriers...An astute psychological study of emotions around the world."