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Culture and Emotion

DAVID MATSUMOTO

Emotions are a central part of our lives and, as such, have been the focus of muchcross-cultural research in psychology. Indeed, the work documenting the universal ba-sis of a set of facial expressions of emotion, reviewed in this chapter, arguably servesas one of the most influential findings in the history of cross-cultural psychology todate. Emotions give key clues to understanding cognition, motivation, and people ingeneral and in that role are a rich and diverse area of cross-cultural inquiry.

In this chapter, Matsumoto provides an overview of the cross-cultural work con-ducted in this area. Beginning with a description of the study of emotion and culturein historical perspective, he discusses especially the relevance and importance of thisline of work for contemporary psychology. Indeed, this line is noteworthy as almostall contemporary research on emotion in mainstream psychology has its roots in the

cross-cultural work documenting expression universality.Matsumoto then presents a brief overview of cross-cultural work on various facetsof emotion, including expression, antecedents, appraisal, subjective experience, emo-tion concepts, and its physiological correlates. This review amply demonstrates thatall aspects of emotion were well studied across cultures over the past two decadesand have produced a plethora of new findings.

The bulk of the review presented in this chapter focuses on work related to the rec-ognition and judgment of emotion across cultures, indeed, because it is the mostwell-studied area of culture and emotion. Matsumoto presents in detail much of thecultural similarities and differences reported in the cross-cultural literature on this as-pect of emotions. In particular, he highlights the way in which the most recent stud-

ies of cultural differences in judgments (of intensity) have attempted not only to docu-ment the existence of cultural differences, but also to test multiple hypotheses aboutwhy those differences occur; he does this through the incorporation of the assess-ment of cultural dimensions of variability in the research. These methodologicalchanges agree with the evolution of theory and method in cross-cultural psychologydiscussed in the introduction to this book, and throughout this volume, as studies be-gin to replace the global, abstract concept of culture with well-defined, measurableconstructs that can be tested in terms of their contribution to cultural differences.

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