EP49: Dr. Batja Mesquita (Part 2!): Tips on how to do emotions more effectively

Given the concept of emotions being OURS (OUtside of us, Relational, and Situational), work culture, home culture, national culture, gender culture...all of these cultural settings are relevant to how we individually do emotions. We can be more resonant with each other, and Dr. Batja Mesquita explains what this means and how we can do it.  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.

Transcript

[00:00:00] Christine Ko: Welcome back to SEE HEAR FEEL. Today is part 2 with Dr. Batja Mesquita. In case you didn't have a chance to listen to her bio, here it is again. Dr. Batja Mesquita is the author of Between Us: How Cultures Create Emotions. She is a social psychologist, scientist, and a pioneer of cultural psychology. She spent much of her life in the Netherlands before her postdoctoral years at the University of Michigan. 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, www.batjamesquita.com.

[00:01:06] You have an idea of cultural switching from work versus home or other environments where you wrote, " Many women in male professional environments have had to learn to feel, express, and manage emotions to be acceptable and effective in these latter environments." Pretty much like people in minoritized positions, acculturating to majority emotions." You go on to write, "Female gender roles for emotions are still rewarding and acceptable at home, even if they are not acceptable and rewarding in traditionally male professional environments." You were saying, then, many women are switching emotional cultures in their everyday lives.

[00:01:45] Is there a way to figure out the best emotions to do?

[00:01:51] Batja Mesquita: Are there certain emotions that by definition are better or more natural than others? I don't think so, but within a certain cultural environment, some emotions may be more productive than others. That's good to be aware of. It also means that since we're making meaning, and meaning making is a human enterprise, there are no emotions that naturally are better than any other emotions. They just may not have the same effect in a particular context, and they certainly may not achieve the same kind of results. If I want to be in a working relationship where people help each other, and where we invoke each other's help, crying may be perfectly fine. It's a more communal relationship. [Yeah.] If we're more in the kind of negotiating relationships that many workplaces still consists of, crying may not be your best bet.

[00:02:46] Christine Ko: What emotions would be most effective in a given situation?

[00:02:50] Batja Mesquita: I think there is no shortcuts. Your question is a really good starting point in the sense that you don't know what's most effective. You don't know how interactions are usually done. Not knowing is the first point of being able to function in a multicultural environment, and being humble about it. Question your own emotions. Question why other people respond the way they do. Being aware that there're differences. Being aware that what is at stake for different people may be different. That what people want to achieve may be different. Even what emotions mean may be different in different cultural context. How other people would respond to them would be different. I think all of those questions will help you get oriented in a new space. I don't think there is a quick way.

[00:03:37] In my book, I suggest a number of questions to be asked. What is at stake? What emotion is normal or prevalent or useful? What do those emotions mean? What are the social consequences of those emotions? Those questions are a good toolbox to start with when you're in a new environment, but I do think ultimately you have to figure it out on a case by case basis. We need to be aware that people in different cultural environments have different emotion norms, a different emotion dance, so to say. 

[00:04:10] Christine Ko: If I'm correct, I think what I got from your answer just now, and also from reading your book, is that it comes back to the concept of deliberate practice, Anders Ericsson's concept, where you just have to do the dance, mess up, step on someone's toes, and then realize, okay, that didn't work. Or you do a dance, and it's perfect, and you're like, oh, that really worked that time. 

[00:04:31] Batja Mesquita: Absolutely. Yeah. [Okay.] Absolutely. You can also ask people, of course. You can try to observe. This is a dance that it's also a hopeful message in the sense that we can learn from each other. We can, if we're curious about each other's emotions, we can find out what's important and how relationships are done. Emotions are the key to unlocking these really important relational values, if you will, [Yeah.] of a different culture. 

[00:04:59] Christine Ko: That sort of touches on your concept of emotional resonance being better than empathy. Can you explain that a little bit? 

[00:05:08] Batja Mesquita: Yeah. Let me say first that empathy: the word empathy is used in many different ways, but sometimes people use it, often people use it, in the sense of feeling what another person feels. And I think that's not always what we get to do. Resonating, as I call it, I borrow that word from anthropology, is a better way of thinking about it in that I can understand this is important for you. I have this example: I taught Dutch to Moroccan illiterate women at some point, and I became friends with one of the women who was married, had many kids, six or so. She was smart, though illiterate, and I really had a friendship with her. It was at the height of my feminist ideals at that point, that was in my twenties. I tried to follow her emotions, and she was, taking into account what her husband would say, how her husband's friends would just, would judge him, if she did certain things. That's regulated or that established her emotional feelings. When listening to her, I was trying to follow that if I were in her situation, and if I were in this culture, and if I had a husband whom I wanted to be loyal to who could lose his honor over my behavior, over my being too friendly with Dutch people, or going out too much by myself, what would I feel then? And so that's very different than imagining what I would feel, because I would never feel that, right? I would feel, if I were with a husband who was so restrictive, given my background and given where I come from, and given my possibilities, I would leave. But that's not the reality she was in. So that's an example. There are many examples that are a little bit less clear, but this is an example where I think you can see how feeling what she feels cannot really be the purpose. It's really trying to resonate with her situation, with her values, with her circumstances, and then understanding the feeling without having it.

[00:07:15] So that's why I think you can make connections even if you are not in exactly that situation, don't care about exactly those things. Resonance is an important concept, especially in a polarized world, where you just imagine that other people are not unhuman, but just have different kinds of concerns, and are in a different position than you yourself are, and at least what you give each other then is humanity. Trying to relate to the humanity of another person. 

[00:07:47] Christine Ko: Your story illustrates that you've had the curiosity to really be able to see that her life circumstances are quite different than yours. And so of course how you would react wouldn't be the same. You can't just put yourself, like you, in that situation and then give advice. Because each of us come from different cultural backgrounds, not just national culture, but also the work cultural experiences we have; it's not easy to necessarily resonate with someone, even if we think we're having the same experience at work. Resonance makes me think of music and vibrating at the same kind of rate or rhythm. 

[00:08:26] Batja Mesquita: We are synchronized, if you're in a football stadium, and you belong to the same club, you probably have the same disappointments and the same moments of excitement. In that context, we can probably empathize, and we are probably in sync with each other. Across different positions and across the boundaries of different cultures, that may not be the case.

[00:08:50] Christine Ko: I think it's very difficult. It can be very difficult.

[00:08:53] Batja Mesquita: I don't think we're always synchronized. 

[00:08:55] Christine Ko: Yeah. Oh, this has been so wonderful. Can I ask you what is one or more lessons that you wish you had learned earlier?

[00:09:03] Batja Mesquita: Yeah. I think I would have liked to understand earlier how much my thinking was determined by my cultural environments. If I were to go back, I would've been much more open. Psychology, really, as a field, is shaped by Western conceptions of emotions. I could have saved, oh, I don't know, 10 or 20 years of research, had I come to this a little earlier and taken more seriously how people speak about their emotions. Earlier in my career, I did wave away different ways of talking about emotions because I thought the emotions of other people, even if they talk about it differently, they must be, deep inside, they must be the same of course. And now I think, how did I know? I didn't. I would've liked to be humbler sooner in my professional life, for sure. It's a good thing, in teaching, in professional meeting, that we understand that our way of thinking about emotions is just one way of thinking about them. 

[00:10:09] Christine Ko: Yes. What you just said actually is the reason why I love your book, because I hadn't thought about MINE versus OURS. I really did think emotions are inside of me, so it really changed the way I think about it, and it really made sense to me, this cultural aspect of emotions. I'm so happy that I'm learning this lesson through you and through your book. You're spreading the word.

[00:10:33] Batja Mesquita: Thank you so much, Christine. 

[00:10:35] Christine Ko: Do you have any final thoughts? 

[00:10:37] Batja Mesquita: We may think that abandoning the idea that emotions are universal dehumanizes people, but I think, to the contrary, taking serious cultural differences in emotions actually gives us a chance to humanize people from other cultures, to make sure we understand what their lives are about and what is at stake for them, what is important, and how they try to strive for the things that are important to them.

[00:11:04] Christine Ko: Oh, that's lovely. Thank you. Thank you so much for spending time to talk to me. It means so much to me. 

[00:11:12] Batja Mesquita: Thank you, Christine. Thank you for having me.