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Professor Batja Mesquita on Culture’s Role in Shaping Emotions and Accounting for Them in Research

Zoë Billington speaks with Professor Batja Mesquita, a pioneer of cultural psychology, about how culture shapes emotion, and how emotions act as powerful tools in relationships. After reading, you may be compelled to rethink if, when, and how to ask participants the very important question, ​“how did you feel about that?” …and even add on ​“and what did you do about that?” and ​“and how did you respond to how that made you feel?”

Culture, Emotions and the Relationships Between: In Conversation with Batja Mesquita

In this episodes, we dive deep into the key ideas within the book and discuss the interplay with systemic ideas. Batja invites us to reconsider emotions as universal responses and takes an outside/​in perspective on how emotions are created through culture. We discuss how this can be vital to understanding and navigating cultural differences in emotions. She skilfully presents how acknowledging these differences in emotions allows us to find common ground, humanising and humbling us for the better. — Sezer and Julie, systemic psychotherapists

Dr. Batja Mesquita: Culture & Emotions

What are the different ways in which culture influences our prioritization of certain emotions, such as shame? Why do some cultures reward emphasizing this emotion, while others do not? What are some ways that European and American emotions differ, and why are there stark discrepancies? — Dorottya Barna

Dancing the Dance of Emotions Between Us

Exploring the research of Batja Mesquita and other cultural psychologists and social psychologists, this episode examines how emotions are enacted between humans. Challenging the US-centric worldview that emotions are only within an individual, Mesquita notes that emotions are continuously enacted within culture and relationships. — Kevin Shorner-Johnson

The Researcher’s Bookshelf

Three Books Invite You to Challenge Your Perspectives. — Susan Fader

Is Being Happy Wrong?

As someone who works and lives in a multicultural environment and does not speak in native language on a daily basis, I find Between Us and the arguments it provides relatable. It helped me to understand the cultural roots of my own emotions — those that I accept, those that I resist and those, I was not aware of. — Adil 

《情緒，無法翻譯》從文化心理學出發，探索情緒如何被創造，以及在不同文化之間的差異

The Nuances & Complexities of Cultural Diversity P2 with Batja Mesquita

Emotionen in mir, Emotionen zwischen uns

Wie Menschen Gefühle erleben, hängt eng mit ihrem kulturellen Umfeld zusammen. Interview mit der Emotionsforscherin Batja Mesquita zeigt, wie eng. — Annette Schäfer

Emotionale Episoden entschlüsseln

In ihrem Buch Between Us stellt Kulturpsychologin Batja Mesquita eine Art Werkzeugkasten vor, um emotionale Episoden in ihrem Umfeld zu entschlüsseln. — Anette Schäfer

Between Us: How Cultures Create Emotions by Batja Mesquita, W.W. Norton, 2022

A must-read for researchers seeking to understand the cultural perspectives surrounding our work. […] Even if you think you’re pretty adept at reading emotional cues and providing the appropriate empathetic reactions, author Batja Mesquita will have you reappraising your skills in Between Us: How Cultures Create Emotions. — Susan Fader

Jenseits westlicher Emotionskategorien: Rezension zu ​„Between Us. How Cultures Create Emotions“ von Batja Mesquita

Am stärksten ist das Buch dann, wenn es sich mit den in westlichen liberalen Demokratien weitverbreiteten Sichtweisen auf Emotionen wie Liebe oder Glück (happiness) auseinandersetzt. Dabei zeigt es mühelos, wie kulturell (und oftmals auch historisch) begrenzt deren Zentralstellung tatsächlich ist. — Dr. Bernd Bösel

Value in Emotion: Batja Mesquita in conversation with Valeria Maltoni

Our conversation ranges from the contours of ​‘shame’ and ​‘anger’ in different cultures, to the invention and uses of ​‘love’ and ​‘happiness’ in culture, how moving away and toward another human being or group works emotionally, and how emotions could tie into stories in the world, rather than being actual mental states.

Episode 89: Batja Mesquita in conversation with Dr. Douglas Brackmann and Meg Terwilliger

Batja Mesquita is a social and cultural psychologist, as well as the author of Between Us: How Cultures Create Emotions. She shares her perspective on understanding different cultures and how they interact in both positive and negative circumstances. 

#1145 How Cultures Create Emotions — Batja Mesquita

This was a totally new topic and conversation for me and I found it fascinating. It was also somewhat confronting because Batja’s research around emotions didn’t neatly fit into my ​‘how emotions work’ box. How dare she. In this chat, we talk about the relationship between culture and its impact on emotions; and not just cultural differences between countries but also differences between religions, corporations and all kinds of groups. — Craig Harper

No Hard Feelings 

Emotions have traditionally been studied as physiological occurrences – controlled by the hardwiring of our brains, and as such, universal and unchanging. But Dutch social psychologist Batja Mesquita, author of Between Us: How Cultures Create Emotions (2022), has spent years looking into the cultural side of emotions, and makes a different case. — Alice Treasure

Why The Human Condition Makes You Feel LOST & UNHAPPY In Life (How To Fix It) | Batja Mesquita

We cover so many thought-provoking topics, including:

• What emotions really are – and why anger, shame or pride might differ across cultures.
• Parenting and how we understand and influence our child’s emotions.
• The immigrant experience and how being raised with dual cultures might affect your relationships and approach to life.
• How a better understanding of cultural differences and language interpretation could help doctor-patient relationships.

I absolutely loved Batja’s book and I think her work is really important. The more we are able to connect with our fellow humans instead of judging them, the happier and more harmonious the world is going to be. I hope you enjoy listening. — Dr. Chatterjee

Varying your viewpoints

Three books illustrate the value of examining the lenses through which you see the world. — Susan Fader

Why you’re not an impostor and you don’t need a best friend

Adam Grant shared the Behavioral Scientist article ​“Americans Are Fake and the Dutch Are Rude!” by Batja Mesquita.

“A fascinating read on the psychology of cultural differences in communication.” — Adam Grant

EP 49: 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 eachother, and Dr. Batja Mesquita explains what this means and how we can do it. — Professor Christine J Ko, MD

EP 48: Dr. Batja Mesquita on emotions as OURS not MINE

Emotions are OURS (OUtside of us, Relational, and Situational), rather than MINE (Mental, INside of us, and Essential). […] The concept of emotions as OURS has revolutionized my thinking about emotions and how I do my emotions! — Professor Christine J Ko, MD

“It Is Not How You Feel”: Batja Mesquita on How Different Cultures Experience Emotions

In the latest installment of our partnership with the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, Batja Mesquita sits down with [NYU Professor] Caitlin Zaloom to discuss her work on emotions. Can we ever understand the feelings of people who are different from ourselves?

Batja Mesquita, ​“Between Us: How Cultures Create Emotions” (Norton, 2022) 

Culture Savvy includes Between Us in their top picks for your 2023 reading list.

Looking for books about bias, diversity, and crossing cultures for 2023? Here are our top reads for this year!

We Are Not All the Same with Dr Batja Mesquita, with host Dr. Nick.

Healthcare Upside/​Down: Unfiltered perspectives on what’s working and what’s not in US healthcare. 

Between Us Makes The Top 21 Psychology Books of 2022

Brilliantly synthesizing original psychological studies and stories from peoples across time and geography, Between Us skillfully argues that acknowledging differences in emotions allows us to find common ground, humanizing and humbling us all for the better.

We crunched the numbers to identify the psychology books that were loved most by our tens of thousands of app users this year.

Between Us excerpt included in Behavioral Scientist’s Most Read Articles of 2022

Americans Are Fake and the Dutch Are Rude! What I learned about emotions when I traded Amsterdam for Ann Arbor. — Batja Mesquita

Between Us included in Publishers Weekly’s Best Books of 2022

Weaving together insights from anthropology, sociology, and psychology, social psychologist Mesquita makes the novel case that emotions arise from social context. The astute analysis enthralls and the case studies on cultures from Japan, Madagascar, the U.S., and West Sumatra fascinate as they upend conventional wisdom and cast a new light on a fundamental part of the human condition.

Batja Mesquita, ​“Between Us: How Cultures Create Emotions” (Norton, 2022)

Dr. Batja Mesquita asks us to reconsider [emotions] through the lens of what they do in our relationships, both one-on-one and within larger social networks. From an outside-in perspective, readers will understand why pride in a Dutch context does not translate well to the same emotion in North Carolina, or why one’s anger at a boss does not mean the same as your anger at a partner in a close relationship. By looking outward at relationships at work, school, and home, we can better judge how our emotions will be understood, how they might change a situation, and how they change us.

This interview was conducted by Jolie Ho, a PhD candidate in clinical psychology whose own research focuses on social connection and reward in the context of social anxiety.

Between Us is one of the ten books nominated by Habit Weekly for the Best Book of the Year 2022. 

#118: How Cultures Create Emotions (ft. Batja Mesquita)

Being your ​‘authentic self’ might not be so clear cut… It’s Not Just In Your Head is a podcast about Capitalism and Mental Health. In this episode, Dr Harriet Fraad and Ikoi Hiroe discuss the MINE vs OURS models and how, if emotions are not essences but situated, that this complicates the therapists and client relationship, in particular ideas around transference and why therapists must remain curious.

Emotions Across Cultures — with Batja Mesquita

In Episode 5 of New Lines’ ​“Wider Angle” podcast, the guest was social psychologist Batja Mesquita. One of the world’s top experts on the subject, Mesquita joined Riada Asimovic Akyol for a conversation about emotions across different cultures, urging us to reconsider roles of social conditions and relationships between people.

Between Us made Life Examined’s best Reads of 2022

In her latest book ​“Between Us: How Culture Creates Emotions,” Gomes de Mesquita analyzes academic studies and stories from around the world to show that how we experience emotions depends on our own experiences, as well as what is valued in our culture or how we relate to other people.

Behavioral Scientist featured Between Us on their list of Notable Books of 2022

How Do Happy Couples Feel? It Depends on the Culture 

Our work shows that we should be cautious when giving self-help advice to people in other cultures. Depending on where you come from, what it means to be happy as a couple can take on very different forms. — Alexander Kirchner-Häusler and Batja Mesquita for the blog Character & Context

Between US Made The 2022 Non-Obvious Book Awards Longlist.

2022 was our most competitive year yet — and we considered over 1000 titles to narrow down our Longlist and Shortlist. The titles selected for this list were the very best non-fiction titles published all year. The Shortlist is announced on December 1st at 11am on YouTube Live.

#710 Batja Mesquita — Between Us: How Cultures Create Emotions

Batja speaks with The Dissenter host Ricardo Lopes. In this episode, we focus on Between Us. We start by talking about what emotions are, and their functions. We discuss how people think about and categorize emotions, and the MINE (Mental, Inside, Essentialist) and OURS (Outside, Relational, Situational) models of emotions, and their relationship with wellbeing…

Why emotions don’t translate across cultures

Wherever you go in the world, people feel emotions differently. Social psychologist Batja Mesquita is a distinguished professor of psychology at the University of Leuven, Belgium, and she joins guest host Paige Phelps to discuss why feelings differ from culture to culture, why shame can be good, and why Pixar’s ​“Inside/​Out” movie might have it all wrong.

The book offers a powerful challenge to assumptions about emotions as universal that are, in truth, a product of the beliefs of WEIRD people. — Elliot Jurist, Professor of Psychology and Philosophy, CCNY, CUNY

Batja Mesquita on Finding Common Ground Through Emotional Understanding

Social psychologist Batja Mesquita, author of the new book ​“Between Us: How Cultures Create Emotions” and director of the Center for Social and Cultural Psychology in Leuven, Belgium, discusses the vast impacts that social conditions can have on human emotions, the importance of remaining humble in our perceptions of each other, and why social media tends to amplify a Western emotional perspective.

Batja Mesquita on Culture and Emotion

There’s the always charming notion that ​“deep down we’re all the same,” suggesting all of humanity shares a universal core of shared emotions. Batja Mesquitabegs to disagree. Based on her pioneering work into the field of cultural psychology, she theorizes that what many would consider universal emotions – say anger or maternal love – are actually products of culture. ​“We’re making these categories that obviously have things in common,” she acknowledges, ​“but they’re not a ​‘thing’ that’s in your head. When you compare between cultures, the commonalities become fewer and fewer.”In this Social Science Bites podcast, she explains how this is so to interviewer David Edmonds.

Americans Are Fake and the Dutch Are Rude!

Even to me, as a cultural psychologist who studied emotions for a living, it was impossible to see my own emotions as products of culture, until I had a real stake in being part of another culture. — Batja Mesquita

Read the Between Us excerpt for free.

Interview with John Maytham on Cape Talk Radio in Cape Town, South Africa.

John Maytham asks a good question about Between Us: ​“Why is this important? Yes, it’s academically important, but…does it have significance in the real world?”

Decoding Emotions: Batja Mesquita in conversation with Shankar Vedantam 

How cultural differences are not just a product of different histories and different languages, but deep phycological divides in how we feel things.

We like to think that all humans are born with the same core emotions: anger, fear, joy, sadness and disgust. But what if that’s not true? This week, psychologist Batja Mesquita offers a different model of emotions — one that can help us to better understand our own feelings and those of the people around us. 

How universal are emotions?

Do we all feel emotions the same way? Dutch psychologist Batja Mesquita has discovered that the western view of emotions fails to recognise how culture influences what we feel.

Emotion and Culture with Batja Mesquita (BS 199)

This month’s episode of Brain Science is an interview with Batja Mesquita, author of Between Us: How Cultures Create Emotions. This is an important book because it describes the evidence that Emotions are not just something people experience ​“from the inside out,” but they also occur between people, which means that culture plays a critical role. We also explore why it is important to appreciate why people from from different cultures may experience emotions in surprisingly different ways.

Bridging the Culture Gap with Dr. Batja Mesquita and Simon Ager

In this episode KMO and Batja discuss

• Batja’s background and story
• What’s WEIRD about Western countries
• US vs Netherlands: cultural differences
• Translating emotions between cultures
• Batja’s take on the KMO’s interview with Rich Firth-Godbehere
• The nature-culture dichotomy.

Where do emotions come from?

Jonathan Bastian talks with Batja Gomes de Mesquita about her book and how her own upbringing influenced her research. Born and raised in the Netherlands by Jewish Holocaust survivor parents, she was always aware of a trauma her parents experienced that she did not fully understand. Mesquita argues that emotions are made as we live our lives together and that when we look at relationships, whether at work, school, or at home, we see how those emotions are created, understood, and might change a situation and us.

Book Review: A Psychologist Plumbs the Cultural Roots of Emotion

Ultimately, Mesquita’s book presents a powerful and stirring argument for viewing emotions and emotional episodes holistically. It’s a call to action that will make our schools, businesses, and justice systems more equitable. Empathy, that much-lauded concept, is not enough. Mesquita argues that we must move past empathy, which entails imagining that we can project our own experiences onto someone else, and instead learn to compassionately ask questions and understand what a person’s emotional response means to them based on their cultural background. — Emily Cataneo

Starred review of BETWEEN US from the new issue of Publishers Weekly

The bounty of case studies captivates and makes a strong argument that social conditions have the power to dictate how one expresses and experiences emotions. The result is a bracing and bold appraisal of how feelings develop.

How Universal Are Our Emotions?

Emotions can be thought of as ​“relational acts between people,” Batja Mesquita writes, rather than as mental states inside us. — Dr. Nikhil Krishnan

Prof. Batja Mesquita answers your questions

- How can we understand our emotions better so that we can have productive relationships?
- What do you hope to research next in social psychology?
- What would be surprising for people to know about emotions?
…

What Science Can Tell Us About How We Express Ourselves: Batja Mesquita on the Way Language Shapes Emotion Across Cultures

Excerpted from Between Us: How Cultures Create Emotions by Batja Mesquita.

The cultural landscape of emotions: Social context plays an important role in shaping how we feel

- Dr. Asifa Majid

Raising Your Child to Have the ​“Right” Emotions 

What is perceived as an ​“acceptable” feeling depends on your culture. — Batja Mesquita

Between Us makes Behavioral Scientist’s Summer Book List 2022

The summer book list is a chance to peruse a collection of the most compelling behavioral science books published so far in the year.

Learning How to Feel: PW Talks with Batja Mesquita

In Between Us (Norton, 2022), psychology professor Mesquita explores the social origins of emotions.

Lost in Translation

A Personal Perspective: Why it is hard to move cultures. — Batja Mesquita

Between Us has been nominated for season 18 of The Next Big Idea Club.