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What We All Need To Know About Human Emotions & How They Affect Our Behaviour with Batja Mesquita

by Dr. Rangan Chatterjee / March 15, 2023

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.

Boekbespreking: Geerdt Magiels

Relational Wellbeing Collaborative
Sarah C. White 7 March 2023

Susan Fader reviews ​“Between Us” in Quirk’s magazine.

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

Two episodes of the See, Hear, Feel podcast with Professor Christine J Ko, MD

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

Vreugde, angst en verdriet zien er overal ter wereld hetzelfde uit, toch? Psychologe Batja Mesquita maakt radicaal komaf met die theorie. ​‘Emoties zijn niet universeel. Wat we voelen en hoe we voelen is gevormd door onze cultuur.’

New Books Network
Today I talked to Batja Mesquita about her book Between Us: How Cultures Create Emotions.

Welke schrijver vindt u jammerlijk onderschat of onterecht vergeten?

Healthcare Upside/​Down: Unfiltered perspectives on what’s working and what’s not in US healthcare. S2E9: We Are Not All the Same with Dr Batja Mesquita, Professor of Psychology at University of Leuven, Belgium with host Dr. Nick.

“…here at the Next Big Idea Club, we crunched the numbers to identify the psychology books that were loved most by our tens of thousands of app users this year.”

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

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.

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.

Boosheid, blijheid of angst blijken geen universele emoties te zijn, zoals de Nederlandse sociaal-psycholoog Batja Mesquita in haar boek Between Us onder meer aantoont. En schaamte, is dat nou een goede of slechte emotie?

Vote here if you think it is the best book.

By Alexander Kirchner-Häusler and Batja Mesquita

From the blog Character & Context by the Society for Personality and Social Psychology

In a widely publicized study, John Gottman, an American relationship researcher and counselor, observed that happier couples showed far more positive than negative emotions during conflict discussions. In their interactions, the couples who were still together many years later all had something in common: They balanced each episode of negative emotions during their encounter with around 5 times the number of positive emotions. This pattern was so remarkably consistent that Gottman and other researchers have called this high ratio of positive to negative emotions ​“the magic ratio.”

But how universal is this ​“magic” across the world? That is what we wanted to know in our study.

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…”

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 will be announced on December 1st at 11am in a LIVE awards show on YouTube Live.

The final meeting of the Science and Ethics for Happiness and Well-being (SEH) Project at the Vatican in Rome (in partnership with the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network (SDSN).

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.

Think is produced five days a week by KERA in Dallas/​Fort Worth.

Nov 1, Mental(izing) Health, By Elliot Jurist: The mental health of mental health.

Social Science Bites podcast interview with David Edmonds.

“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.”

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?”

“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.”

This week on Hidden Brain: 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. 

“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.”

Jonathan Bastian talks with Batja Gomes de Mesquita

Publisher’s Weekly also talks with Batja Mesquita about Between Us and the exploration of the social origins of emotions.

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

Batja Mesquita on the Way Language Shapes Emotion Across Cultures

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

“In this impressive debut, a social psychologist analyzes academic studies and stories from around the world to make a case for how different cultures place value on the emotions that shape our individual and collective social relationships.”

Between Us has been nominated as one of the 18 nominees for the next edition of The Next Big Idea.
​“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.”

SCIENCE • 7 Jul 2022 • Vol 377, Issue 6602 • p. 16
REVIEW: The cultural landscape of emotions: Social context plays an important role in shaping how we feel

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