When I started my Ph.D. research on culture and emotion, psychology had reached its conclusion on the topic. There was general consensus about 6+ basic emotion characterized by universal facial expressions, hard-wired, and with a unique phenomenology. Even now this is what most of my students think when they come into my courses.

What puzzled me at the time was that anthropologists came to a radically different conclusion, that emotions were to be understood from the social context in which they occurred, that they reflected culture-specific customs and ideals of social relationships, and embodied cultural principles of morality. I set out to reconcile these two perspectives on the relationship between emotion and culture.

I identified two sources of bias towards universality findings in psychology. First, whereas psychology was guided by an assumption of universality, ethnographic studies were not. Thus, psychological research was not designed to find cultural differences, and for that reason alone, failed to examine the phenomena that should be expected to vary across cultures. Second, and in a related vein, most psychological studies focused on ‘ability’, rather than ‘practice’, whereas emotions described in the anthropological literature mostly concerned practices –i.e., the prevalent patterns of emotion. One of the goals of my own research has been to theoretically predict cultural differences as well as design studies capable of capturing these cultural differences.

The sociocultural theory of emotion that we developed challenges the traditional view that emotions are innate programs that are invariant and universal. Our theory does not deny the body a role in emotion experience, but rather it assumes that our neurological and physiological dispositions are insufficient explanations for why we feel what we feel. By exploring the ways in which emotions are social and relational phenomena, my collaborators and I have established the existence of significant and systematic differences in emotional experience across cultures. The heterogeneity in emotional experience has led me to suggest that the process rather than the content of emotional experience may be universal. I propose a dynamic interchange between the processes that go on inside the person, and those that exist outside it. Emotional experience, in this view, is always interdependent with its sociocultural context, and cannot be separated from this context without losing its character. This means that the sociocultural context, rather than spoiling or distracting from a basic theory of emotions, is an important constituent of emotional experience. Culture is not just overlay, but it is an active ingredient in shaping or fabricating the experience. Therefore, in order to understand emotions, even within the European and North American context, their cultural context should be considered and understood.

This theoretical viewpoint not only addresses some of the most basic questions in the psychology of emotion, but also opens up new lines of inquiry, for example, the reactions to changes of culture as occurs with ‘acculturation’. In this new line of research, we have started to show that one of the problems of immigration is the mismatch between an immigrant’s emotional repertoir on the one hand, and the host culture’s models of self and relating. We propose, and have found some first evidence for negative behavioral, social and health consequences of this mismatch for the immigrant. An implication of this theory of emotions as culturally variable is that a successful policy of integration considers the emotional and relational differences at stake.

I am a Fellow of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, a Fellow of the Association for Psychological Science, and a Fellow of the Royal Dutch Academy of Science.