🔆 Comment les cultures créent les émotions ? *️⃣🌀✳️

#MindAndCulture

✅ Shinobu Kitayama (psychologue) explique combien le “processus de création de sens” est fondamentalement social, interpersonnel et surtout culturel.

✴️ “Nos cerveaux humains sont des artefacts culturels (Mithen & Parsons, 2008; Taylor, 2006). Les cerveaux mettent en œuvre la culture, transmettent la culture et sont câblés par la culture.” (Gendron et al., 2020, p. 188).

🌀 Chacun naît parmi une tradition culturelle, où nous sommes socialisés et “formés” pour agir au mieux dans ce milieu socio-culturel, par l’apprentissage de scripts, conventions et rites.

✴️✴️ La “culture” est cet ensemble cohérent de représentations mentales (idées, croyances et valeurs) et de manifestations (pratiques comportementales, artefacts et institutions) partagées par un groupe et acquises par les nouvelles générations grâce à l’apprentissage social.

✴️ Pendant ce processus, nos cerveaux sont “recâblés” et réorganisés pour agir correctement et efficacement dans ce milieu culturel (Kitayama & Salvador, 2017).

*️⃣ Notre esprit est préparé biologiquement… il se développe et se complémente socio-culturellement (Tomasello, 2014).

🔆🔆 N’est-ce pas là une magnifique opportunité pour comprendre la diversité qui enrichit nos cultures ?

Alors, pour les curieux sur le sujet, je vous recommande vivement le livre récent de Batja Gomes de Mesquita
🔖 🔖 Between Us: How Cultures Create Emotions 🔖🔖

✳️ Elle explique, par exemple, comment “l’authenticité”, cette manière d’exprimer ses sentiments intérieurs, est une “vertu” dans nos sociétés occidentales mais presque nulle part ailleurs.

✳️ Dans une grande partie de l’Afrique et de l’Asie, c’est un signe d’immaturité.
✳️ Par contre, “le calme est une émotion préférée dans une culture qui s’attend à ce que vous placiez les besoins du groupe au-dessus des vôtres”.
✳️ C’est donc en grande partie la norme en dehors de l’Occident.

👍 😉 Lisa Feldman Barrett


#Culture #Emotions #Affects
English version 
hashtagMindAndCulture✅ Shinobu Kitayama (psychologist) explains how the “meaning-making process” is fundamentally social, interpersonal, and above all, cultural.

✴️ “Human brains are cultural artifacts (c.f., Mithen & Parsons, 2008; Taylor, 2006). Brains implement culture, transmit culture, and are wired by culture” (Gendron et al., 2020, p. 188).

🌀 Everyone is born within a cultural tradition, where we are socialized and “trained” to act at best in this socio-cultural environment by learning scripts, conventions, and rites.

✴️ During this process, our brains are “rewired” and reorganized to act correctly and effectively in this cultural milieu (Kitayama & Salvador, 2017).

✴️ Our mind is biologically prepared… it develops and complements itself socio-culturally (Tomasello, 2014).

🔆🔆 Isn’t it a fantastic opportunity to understand the diversity that enriches our cultures?

–> So, for those curious about the subject, I highly recommend the recent book by Batja Gomes de Mesquita

🔖 🔖 Between Us: How Cultures Create Emotions 🔖🔖

✳️ She explains, for example, how “authenticity,” the way of expressing one’s inner feelings, is a “virtue” in our Western societies but almost nowhere else.

✳️ In much of Africa and Asia, it signifies immaturity.

✳️ On the other hand, “calmness is a favorite emotion in a culture that expects you to put the needs of the group above your own.”

✳️ So this is essentially the norm outside of the West.

REFERENCES :

– Gendron, M., Mesquita, B., & Barrett, L. F. (2020). The Brain as a Cultural Artifact: Concepts, Actions, and Experiences within the Human Affective Niche. In L. J. Kirmayer, C. M. Worthman, S. Kitayama, R. Lemelson, & C. Cummings (Eds.), Culture, Mind, and Brain (1st ed., pp. 188–222). Cambridge University Press.
– Kitayama, S., & Salvador, C. E. (2017). Culture embrained: Going beyond the nature-nurture dichotomy. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 12(5), 841–854.
– Mesquita, B. (2022). Between Us: How Cultures Create Emotions. W. W. Norton & Company.
– Mithen, S., & Parsons, L. (2008). The Brain as a Cultural Artefact. Cambridge Archaeological Journal, 18(3), 415-422.
– Taylor, T. (2006). The human brain is a cultural artefact. The Edge: What is your dangerous idea? Retrieved from https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11835
– Taylor, T. (2011). The artificial ape: How technology changed the course of human evolution (1st ed.). Palgrave Macmillan.
– Tomasello, M. (2014). The ultra-social animal. European journal of social psychology, 44(3), 187-194.
– Uchida, Y., & Kitayama, S. (2009). Happiness and unhappiness in east and west: Themes and variations. Emotion, 9(4), 441–456.

Between Us: How Cultures Create Emotions
Between Us: How Cultures Create Emotions

COMMENTAIRES

David HAMPTON-MUSSEAU For a more nuanced view on culture, and its abolishment as determinant of behavior see: https://cultpsy.files.wordpress.com/2009/01/1119961882.jpg
–> Page 54: “It was Spinoza who started to treat emotion and
feeling (the passions) as vital to the expressive communal competencies of humans, instead of viewing them as the mere result of machine-like proceedings in their viscera. While advancing the central tenets of a secular, deterministic, and hence fully scientific worldview, this Spinozist train of
thought has also provided an alternative to the tendency to always put biology first, which featured so predominantly in the British tradition”.
Paul Voestermans, I truly thank you for sharing this one 👍
The way you revived Bourdieu’s “habitus” is tremendous 😉
I am also considering an overall theoretical reflection on affects/culture through such a lens, with a Spinozist ontology.
–> in Voestermans and Verheggen (2013: 150): Bourdieu’s core idea is that practices are inscribed into the body, quite literally (incarner is a term that he uses and it connotes flesh, as in “to end up in the flesh”). Without people being aware of it, their bodies become styled according to practices and artifacts in which they are immersed in daily life.
Maybe you also know this book 📚
Threadgold, S. (2020). Bourdieu and affect: Towards a theory of affective affinities. Bristol University Press.