Emotions are OURS (OUtside of us, Relational, and Situational), rather than MINE (Mental, INside of us, and Essential; essential meaning always the same) (as in the movie Inside Out). The concept of emotions as OURS has revolutionized my thinking about emotions and how I do my emotions! Dr. Batja Mesquita is the author of Between Us: How Cultures Create Emotions. A social psychologist, an affective scientist, and a pioneer of cultural psychology, she spent much of her life in the Netherlands before moving to the United States for her postdoctoral years at the University of Michigan, where she was part of the “culture and cognition group” that played a key role in the start of cultural psychology. She subsequently worked in North Carolina at Wake Forest University. Currently, she is a Distinguished Professor of Psychology at the University of Leuven, Belgium, where she studies the role of culture in emotions, and of emotions in culture and society. She directs the Center for Social and Cultural Psychology in Leuven. She has numerous honors and awards; most recently receiving the Outstanding Contribution to Advances in Cultural Psychology Award by the Society for Personality and Social Psychology in 2022. You can find more information at www.batjamesquita.com.
Emotions are OURS (OUtside of us, Relational, and Situational), rather than MINE (Mental, INside of us, and Essential; essential meaning always the same) (as in the movie Inside Out). The concept of emotions as OURS has revolutionized my thinking about emotions and how I do my emotions! Dr. Batja Mesquita is the author of Between Us: How Cultures Create Emotions. A social psychologist, an affective scientist, and a pioneer of cultural psychology, she spent much of her life in the Netherlands before moving to the United States for her postdoctoral years at the University of Michigan, where she was part of the “culture and cognition group” that played a key role in the start of cultural psychology. She subsequently worked in North Carolina at Wake Forest University. Currently, she is a Distinguished Professor of Psychology at the University of Leuven, Belgium, where she studies the role of culture in emotions, and of emotions in culture and society. She directs the Center for Social and Cultural Psychology in Leuven. She has numerous honors and awards; most recently receiving the Outstanding Contribution to Advances in Cultural Psychology Award by the Society for Personality and Social Psychology in 2022. You can find more information at www.batjamesquita.com.
[00:00:00] Christine Ko: Welcome back to SEE HEAR FEEL. Today I am excited to be speaking with Dr. Batja Mesquita. Dr. Batja Mesquita is the author of Between Us: How Cultures Create Emotions. This is one of my favorite books right now. It's an amazing book. I highly recommend it. She is a social psychologist, scientist, and a pioneer of cultural psychology. She spent much of her life in the Netherlands before moving to the US for her postdoctoral years at the University of Michigan. At that institution, she was part of the culture and cognition group that played a key role in the start of cultural psychology. She subsequently worked in North Carolina at Wake Forest University, and currently she is a distinguished Professor of Psychology at the University of Leuven in Belgium, where she studies the role of culture and emotions and of emotions in culture and society. She directs the Center for Social and Cultural Psychology in Leuven, and she has numerous honors and awards, most recently receiving the Outstanding Contribution to Advances in Cultural Psychology Award by the Society for Personality and Social Psychology in 2022. You can find more information about her on her website, which will be linked in the show notes; it is also www.batjamesquita.com. Thank you so much, Batja, for spending some time with me. I am, as I said, so excited.
[00:01:26] Batja Mesquita: Thank you, Christine, for having me. This is really a wonderful opportunity to talk.
[00:01:32] Christine Ko: First off, would you mind sharing a personal anecdote?
[00:01:35] Batja Mesquita: Not at all. There are many. I think immigrants usually have a lot of anecdotes to tell. When I first came to the United States, I actually didn't know so well how to respond when people made me compliments or praised me. And so you just did that. And I'm trying to be smooth about it, but my native response would be to be very embarrassed and look at the floor and say, I'm just an ordinary person and there's nothing special about me.
[00:02:07] And so that happened a lot when I first came to the US, that people compliment each other a lot, and including me, I would say. And I had no idea how to respond to that. So, rather than saying, oh, thank you so much, thank you for having me, I would say, oh no, not at all, that book wasn't that great. I had many of those kind of experiences.
[00:02:30] Christine Ko: That makes sense to me. I agree about the compliment thing because I think the culture that I grew up in, you're supposed to be humble, and no one ever taught me how to accept a compliment. I heard a lecture by a Professor in Management at Yale, and she was talking about charisma. She was talking from an American culture perspective, which I didn't realize at the time, because I hadn't read your book yet. She was saying, when you get a compliment, charismatic people, what they do is they bask: just for a moment, they'll just say, thank you, or, oh, or just smile or something. It was revolutionary to me. I was like, oh, is that what you're supposed to do when you get a compliment? But I realized after I would try it out a couple times. I realized, oh, it makes everyone feel better.
[00:03:13] Batja Mesquita: In the book I describe emotions as a dance. People in different cultures dance differently. Complimenting somebody in that way is a very unusual step in the Dutch dance. But also that the response then is not practiced or not scripted. So it's just one of those moments where you feel like you trip when you're in another culture. Of course, there are many more of those examples. But I think that is one of the ways in which you can see the way emotions are done. Emotions like pride or embarrassment or humbleness is very much socially and culturally embedded. And yes, not something that you do by yourself, even though when you're in your native environment, you never think that it's cultured. Yet when you cross the boundaries or are in another context, it's very clear that you somehow misfit.
[00:04:10] Christine Ko: Your book, as I said, it really has revolutionized my thinking on emotions because I really thought before reading it that emotions are mine, inside of me. Your book really talks about your concept of acronyms, MINE and OURS, which I loved. Could you talk about that a little bit?
[00:04:28] Batja Mesquita: I think that especially in Western cultures, people think about emotions as MINE. So that's the acronym for Mental feelings INside a person and they're Essential. By which I mean that we think that we have emotions in our body or in our heads, in our mind. They're always the same. In the book, I'm referring to the movie Inside Out because I think that's the perfect representation of how we tend to think about it as little creatures that live in our head, and that are elicited, but that are really making up who we are.
[00:05:05] And then the idea is that they're always the same, right? Whether you're angry at your child or angry at the state of the world or angry at your partner is all the same emotions. In many other cultures, but I would say that holds for us too, emotions are not seen primarily as mental states, but primarily as something you do with other people. So I call that Relational acts in the body. So that's the R in OURS. And so they're OUtside the person, and they're Situated. So my anger at my child, it's very different than the anger at the state of the world, if only because the other person responds really differently.
[00:05:45] So how the anger evolves makes it a very different creature. If you look more, and if you pay more attention to the OURS aspects of your emotion, the way in which your emotions are tied to the outside world, you can also understand a lot more about them.
[00:06:03] If we look at, what do our emotions do in a relationship? We can maybe understand why we have some emotions. So like when I'm angry that is probably the act of not accepting what is happening in the relationship. And when I'm sad, I'm taking a different kind of position. I do say that I don't like the state of the world that, you know, that things are lost and negative, but I don't say I'm entitled to a better treatment or that I'm not gonna accept it. Looking at emotions in this way of, what do they do in relationships and what do other people do in response to them is, I think, a really enriching approach to our emotional lives.
[00:06:48] Christine Ko: Thank you. This OURS model resonates with me. I think that's true for my kids. I've always said this, and teachers will say that too. "We see a different kid oftentimes at school than what you might see at home." And I think that's because of the way that they're doing their emotions. They may be just as frustrated at school, but they express it completely differently than they do with me.
[00:07:08] Batja Mesquita: To add to that, they may be differently frustrated too because they know with you that they have a lever to change your behavior, and at school they probably have to accept more what they get dealt with. The idea that the emotion is really the same but it comes out differently may be challenged. The whole situation at school is a different one than the situation at home. When they get frustrated, they can count on a very different response from their own mom than from the teacher who has to deal with 20 or 30 kids and has to get on with her classes and the material to be learned. The meaning making in this situation is different. And the feelings are too, probably.
[00:07:49] Christine Ko: Yes. I love your idea of this cultural aspect of emotions and not necessarily just culture like a Dutch culture or a Korean culture, or a Korean American culture. How, you know, in immigrant subsequent generations, the children of Korean parents who had immigrated were no longer "Korean", the way their parents were. So even within a family, there can be multiple cultures. And then also you have an idea of cultural switching from work versus home or other environments. And you go on to write, female gender roles for emotions are still rewarding and acceptable at home. If this is true, you were saying many women are switching emotional cultures in their everyday lives in traditionally male professional environments. Can you talk about those concepts a little bit?
[00:08:39] Batja Mesquita: I think there's slightly different concepts, although you can say, one way of looking at emotions is that we always have the same emotions. But people like you and I who have been exposed to different cultures, and now I'm talking national cultures. You can say we have parts of these different cultures integrated in our emotional life. And this is one of the big topics of study, how we actually combine those different emotions from different cultures.
[00:09:09] And you could say . I'm never fully Dutch anymore and I'm never fully American either. I just got stuck somewhere in the middle. In the case of Korean Americans, we find also that Korean Americans are more Korean at home and more American at work. And we find something similar for a different group of immigrants, Turkish people in Belgium. So it's possible that we just adjust to the expectations of the environment, and emotions do things. Every environment likes emotions to do different things. If I am in an American environment, what I want to do with other people is make them feel unique. Increase their self-esteem, make them feel special. That's in my everyday interactions in America. In the Netherlands, I would say the goal is more to feel equal. Not unique. My mother used to say, act normal, that's special enough. So it was really this idea of everybody is the same, but what you do try to emphasize is a connectedness. Everybody is the same and egalitarian. We are connected; that would be more the emphasis.
[00:10:19] It's very possible we also find differences in, for example, the role of anger. In some cultures, anger is good to assert yourself. In other cultures, it's good to not assert yourself and adjust. And so the role of anger and shame are very different.
[00:10:35] And you can see that people switch from making anger more prominent to making another emotion, for example, shame more prominent. Just to come back to your women in the workplace. Cultural boundaries are very fluid, but also we're all part of different cultures, and I think gender culture is one of those.
[00:10:59] I recite an example from my own working life where I was the director of a center and I was in a meeting with other directors, for the most part, male. The meeting went on and I didn't think my group was getting what we deserved, and I started to cry. And that was totally not well received. People thought it was awful. People reminded me that I had cried. They were belittling me. And when I thought about it, I thought, This is a different kind of relational goal. Crying is saying I need your help. For my wellbeing, I need you to help me. And that may be perfectly okay for a private context, and especially for the less powerful person in the private context which women still are often. But crying doesn't meet a professional norm. It was a meeting with a lot of screaming, and people being angry and indignant, an emotion where you say, I'm not accepting it, you need to do something different. Whereas my emotion of crying was an emotion of invoking help. And so what I'm saying is that the emotion that is suitable and functional and meets the purpose in one context may not be the emotion that is useful and and beneficial in another context. The example of gender is one example, but of course there are many examples. The emotions you have in an adult relationships also are not very useful in a relationship to your own child, right? That's a different kind of emotional relationship where you want to meet different kinds of goals.
[00:12:35] Christine Ko: Yeah. How do you then be authentic?
[00:12:39] Batja Mesquita: It's one of the hardest questions, I think. The concept of authenticity is tied to the idea that some emotions are more you than others, necessarily, or almost biologically or naturally. I do think that certain constructions of yourself in the world are more effective than other constructions [ Mm-hmm.] of yourself in the world. And also that you can adjust your emotions, start seeing the world in a slightly different way. So I do think it has to do with how you make meaning, and meaning making is subject to control.
[00:13:14] What we also know, and this is interesting, is that in Western culture, where we think of our emotions as authentic, it is much more costly to suppress those emotions than in a lot of other cultures where people see emotions more as really things that we do in a certain environment.
[00:13:35] And so if your vision on emotions is an OURS vision, and you think of emotions as this is what is needed. There's research that if Chinese customer servants change their emotions into smiling; they start feeling that way, and that it doesn't harm them at all. They don't feel inauthentic and they don't suffer from burnout or alienation. We do find burnout or alienation for people who think that their own feelings are authentic. It's a complicated answer. I think the answer to, is it possible to construct your emotions in a way that may be not traditionally accepted in the workplace? Yes, absolutely. Can the workplace ultimately be changed when a lot of people do that? Yes, probably. If you have enough people doing that, the workplace just becomes a different place. It's certainly possible to reshape your work environment and to reshape cultures. Cultures are made by people. If we all start doing our emotions differently, we have a different emotional culture. At the same time, you cannot by yourself change an emotion culture. If you come into a culture where the majority of people have different kind of relational purposes, like being on top of things, being in control, being independent, asserting yourself, being a strong person, defending their groups' rights, then crying may not be as effective. You just have to be aware of that.
[00:15:08] Christine Ko: I'm going to continue this conversation in a part 2 because I really don't want to shortchange all of the good things that Dr. Mesquita has to say about the emotions that are between us, relational, and situational, and how we can do the emotional dance better. Thank you to Batja, for spending time today, and we'll continue next week.