Book Review: A Psychologist Plumbs the Cultural Roots of Emotion
In “Between Us,” psychologist Batja Mesquita argues that emotions aren’t universal, but inherited from social groups.
November 2, 2022 by Undark
By Emily Cataneo
When the Australian anthropologist Christine Dureau traveled to the Solomon Islands for research, she brought her toddler along, at first imagining that the universal experience of maternal love would help her relate to the Simbo women living in this foreign culture. But it soon became clear that maternal love for an Australian was different than maternal love for a Simbo woman: She learned that maternal taru, the Simbo word for love, could often be tinged with sadness. Dureau confronted this difference head-on when her daughter fell sick and a Simbo woman named Liza tried to provide comfort by relating a story about her own young son dying of measles.
For many years, psychologists and other scientists believed that deep down, all of humankind experienced the same set of evolutionarily hard-wired emotions. Under this schema, anger, for example, was a concrete, immutable experience that happens deep inside all human beings, the same for a White American sipping coffee in Manhattan as for native Siberian herding reindeer. When Batja Mesquita, a key figure in the development of the field of cultural psychology, started researching emotion more than 30 years ago, she was confident that this model was correct. But Mesquita, who is today a distinguished professor at the University of Leuven in Belgium, has come to view emotions through a completely different lens. In her new book, “Between Us: How Cultures Create Emotions,” Mesquita makes a provocative argument that when it comes to emotions, we are not all the same. “Are other people angry, happy, and scared, just like you?” she queries. “And are your feelings just like theirs? I do not think so.”
Mesquita’s book hinges on a key distinction between what she calls “MINE” emotions and “OURS” emotions. For too long, she posits, cultural psychology has relied on an intrinsically Western and individualist model of emotions: the MINE, or “Mental, INside the person, and Essentialist,” model. This framework relies on the idea that the most important part of an emotional experience takes place inside the individual. But, says Mesquita, most non-Western cultures conceive of emotions as OURS: “OUtside the person, Relational and Situated.”
For Mesquita, the OURS model, which invites us to look “outward, rather than inward” when it comes to emotion, is a more appropriate schema than the long-vaunted MINE model. She maintains that we must let go of our belief that emotions happen mainly inside a person, and instead look to emotions as culturally constructed experiences that happen between people, vary between cultures, and look different depending on cultural and social context.
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