The Cultural Shaping of Emotion

This book explores the cultural logic of emotion, examining how it emerges and affects multicultural societies. Drawing on cultural, clinical, and relationship psychology, linguistics, and affective science, it offers fresh insights and research directions for understanding emotions as dynamic, socially enacted, culturally embedded processes.

How can we advance our understanding of emotion through a socio-cultural lens? How do we overcome decade-long debates on universality versus culture-specificity? This book engages with these challenges by documenting rich empirical evidence of similarity as well as cultural variation in how emotions are conceptualised, experienced, expressed, and regulated. Examples include how emotions unfold in romantic relationships and are linked to well-being and distress. With nuance and rigour, it includes diverse theoretical and methodological approaches and examples on numerous specific emotions across varied cultural contexts. The volume also explores how culture–emotion dynamics unfold in multicultural societies, shedding light on emotional acculturation, intergroup relations, and macro-level cultural change under societal threat. Bringing together leading experts worldwide, each chapter outlines promising directions for future research, inviting scholars, practitioners and students across cultural psychology, clinical science, applied linguistics, and relationship research to reimagine emotion as a culturally embedded and socially enacted phenomenon.