Experiences of emotion are content-rich events that emerge at the level of psychological description, but must be causally constituted by neurobiological processes. This chapter outlines an emerging scientific agenda for understanding what these experiences feel like and how they arise. We review the available answers to what is felt (i.e., the content that makes up an experience of emotion) and how neurobiological processes instantiate these properties of experience. These answers are then integrated into a broad framework that describes, in psychological terms, how the experience of emotion emerges from more basic processes. We then discuss the role of such experiences in the economy of the mind and behavior.

The authors hypothesized that whereas Japanese culture encourages socially engaging emotions (e.g., friendly feelings and guilt), North American culture fosters socially disengaging emotions (e.g., pride and anger). In two cross-cultural studies, the authors measured engaging and disengaging emotions repeatedly over different social situations and found support for this hypothesis. As predicted, Japanese showed a pervasive tendency to reportedly experience engaging emotions more strongly than they experienced disengaging emotions, but Americans showed a reversed tendency. Moreover, as also predicted, Japanese subjective well-being (i.e., the experience of general positive feelings) was more closely associated with the experience of engaging positive emotions than with that of disengaging emotions. Americans tended to show the reversed pattern. The established cultural differences in the patterns of emotion suggest the consistent and systematic cultural shaping of emotion over time.

We review recent work demonstrating consistent context effects during emotion perception. Visual scenes, voices, bodies, other faces, cultural orientation, and even words shape how emotion is perceived in a face, calling into question the still-common assumption that the emotional state of a person is written on and can be read from the face like words on a page. Incorporating context during emotion perception appears to be routine, efficient, and, to some degree, automatic. This evidence challenges the standard view of emotion perception represented in psychology texts, in the cognitive neuroscience literature, and in the popular media and points to a necessary change in the basic paradigm used in the scientific study of emotion perception.

Two studies tested the hypothesis that in judging people's emotions from their facial expressions, Japanese, more than Westerners, incorporate information from the social context. In Study 1, participants viewed cartoons depicting a happy, sad, angry, or neutral person surrounded by other people expressing the same emotion as the central person or a different one. The surrounding people's emotions influenced Japanese but not Westerners' perceptions of the central person. These differences reflect differences in attention, as indicated by eye-tracking data (Study 2): Japanese looked at the surrounding people more than did Westerners. Previous findings on East-West differences in contextual sensitivity generalize to social contexts, suggesting that Westerners see emotions as individual feelings, whereas Japanese see them as inseparable from the feelings of the group.

The psychological and anthropological literature on cultural variations in emotions is reviewed. The literature has been interpreted within the framework of a cognitive-process model of emotions. Both cross-cultural differences and similarities were identified in each phase of the emotion process; similarities in 1 phase do not necessarily imply similarities in other phases. Whether cross-cultural differences or similarities are found depends to an important degree on the level of description of the emotional phenomena. Cultural differences in emotions appear to be due to differences in event types or schemas, in culture-specific appraisal propensities, in behavior repertoires, or in regulation processes. Differences in taxonomies of emotion words sometimes reflect true emotion differences like those just mentioned, but they may also just result from differences in which emotion-process phase serves as the basis for categorization.

motions are complex, structured phenomena. They are not mere E feeling states, that is, intraindividual states of conscious awareness that might as well remain within the confines of the individual's mind. They are parts of the very process of interacting with the environment. They are affective responses to what happens in the environment and cognitive representations of the event's meaning for the individual. They are, frst and foremost, modes of relating to the environment: states of readiness for engaging, or not engaging, in interaction with that environment. It will be difficult to understand the social role of emotions if these are not, from the outset, viewed as dynamically changing, structured elements in ongoing interchanges, which both influence and are influenced by the other elements in these interchanges, such as the external events and the attitudes and actions of the other individuals involved.Emphasizing the composite and structured nature of emotions is important because it implies that emotions can be described and not 51

Three vignette studies examined stereotypes of the emotions associated with high-and low-status group members. In Study 1a, participants believed that in negative situations, high-status people feel more angry than sad or guilty and that low-status people feel more sad and guilty than angry. Study 1b showed that in response to positive outcomes, high-status people are expected to feel more pride and low-status people are expected to feel more appreciation. Study 2 showed that people also infer status from emotions: Angry and proud people are thought of as high status, whereas sad, guilty, and appreciative people are considered low status. The authors argue that these emotion stereotypes are due to differences in the inferred abilities of people in high and low positions. These perceptions lead to expectations about agency appraisals and emotions related to agency appraisals. In Study 3, the authors found support for this process by manipulating perceptions of skill and finding the same differences in emotion expectations.

A theory of cultural differences in emotions was tested in a questionnaire study. Hypotheses about the differences between emotion in individualist and collectivist contexts covered different components of emotion: concerns and appraisals, action readiness, social sharing, and belief changes. The questionnaire focused on 6 types of events that were rated as similar in meaning across cultures. Participants were 86 Dutch individualist respondents and 171 Surinamese and Turkish collectivist respondents living in the Netherlands. As compared with emotions in individualist cultures, emotions in collectivist cultures (a) were more grounded in assessments of social worth and of shifts in relative social worth, (b) were to a large extent taken to reflect reality rather than the inner world of the individual, and (c) belonged to the self-other relationship rather than being confined to the subjectivity of the self. Cross-cultural endeavors in psychology have focused on the universality of emotional phenomena (e.g., Ekman, 1973; Scherer & Wallbott, 1994), revealing a number of pancultural features of emotions. The psychological focus on universality has precluded the search for cultural variations in emotion. Ethnographic studies (e.g., Lutz, 1988) have clearly illustrated such differences, but methodological limitations do not allow for firm conclusions on the nature and the extent of cultural variation in emotion, either. The goal of the present study is, therefore, to determine whether within the context of similar emotional situations there are interpretable and predictable differences in emotional phenomena. I studied differences in emotions by comparing individualist with collectivist cultures. Individualism and collectivism are best represented as systems of meanings, practices, and social institutions in the context of which the nature of emotion should be expected to vary. Collectivism is a set of meanings and practices that emphasize the relatedness of a person to his or her in-group and, more generally, to the world. Similarly, individualism is a set of meanings and practices that underline the individual as bounded, unique, and independent (Markus & Kitayama, 1991; Shweder & Levine, 1984; Triandis, 1995). Even though collectivism and individualism may characterize cultural groups, not all individuals in a given context engage in the same ideas and practices, nor do they engage in them in identical ways (Markus,