Emotions

Basic and secondary emotions have been explained by both physiological emotion theories and cognitive emotion theories. This chapter reviews these explanations and examines the categories of emotions, positive, negative and ambivalent. More importantly, the authors highlight the role of culture with respect to emotions, e.g. differences in handling emotions. Cross-cultural studies distinguish between feeling and display rules. Feeling rules apply more or less everywhere, display rules are culture-specific. These rules determine, among other things, whether or to what extent feelings may be shown or must be concealed or suppressed. The ability to accurately recognize emotions, which are often communicated with facial expressions, is much more likely with members of one’s own social group. Cultural distance is thus a good predictor of the ability to recognize emotions. The more culturally similar the respective countries of origin, the more people are able to recognize the emotions of others.