Culture and emotions – The daily blog of behavioral and cognitive economics

How Culture Shapes the Stories We Tell About Our Emotions

In the 1980s, there was a burst of research on how people told stories about emotion; social scientists wanted to understand how people react to common experiences. Their subjects described clammy hands on a first date, clenched jaws during a final exam, road rage while sitting in traffic. From this collection of stories, researchers created a map of sorts—where certain situations and behaviors corresponded to specific emotions (like anger, joy, and sadness). The only problem was that almost all the people surveyed were students from North America and Western Europe. ….[READ]