Mesquita draws upon over 30 years of her research on cross-cultural emotional differences, enriched by personal anecdotes. She shares that empathy alone is insufficient for fcomprehending another person’s feelings. She emphasises that culture plays a significant role in shaping the emotions one experiences. Even when terms like “anger” or “shame” can be translated, it is crucial to understand that one cannot simply apply their cultural interpretation of these emotions without experiencing them within that cultural context.
Gaining insight into a different culture’s emotional concepts necessitates examining the emotional episodes associated with those concepts to grasp their significance, the underlying goals, values, or expectations present in a given situation, and how individuals from that culture may react. She notes that emotions exist within the dynamics of interpersonal relationships, which are influenced by the physical bodies of the people involved. While human relationships and bodies share similarities across cultures, they also exhibit considerable variation.
In some languages, the terms for pink and red are the same. However, the disparities in emotional lexicons across languages are considerably greater. Emotion words do not correspond neatly from one language to another. The primary focus of her book is on this variation and its importance. She explores scenarios ranging from the everyday (such as parenting) to the globally significant (the role of emotional understanding in an increasingly interconnected world). This book is essential reading for anyone for wanting to better understand emotions.
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