What are emotions? Cross-cultural perspectives have a lot to teach us

What cultural differences in emotion concepts teach us about the brain and mind

This series of four articles on the science of emotions is adapted from a lecture I recently gave at McGill University in Montreal, Canada. We’re going to talk about ways that people from different cultures understand emotions. As we’ll see, there’s a variety of ways that people have thought about emotions, both nowadays and in the past, none of which is inherently ‘right’ or ‘wrong’.

It can be hard to imagine thinking differently about something that most of us feel like we understand intuitively, at least to some extent. Emotions fall firmly into this category for many people, and it may be jarring to hear how other cultures have perspectives on emotions that are very different from your own.

Luckily, researchers have come up with clever acronyms that make our lives easier by providing useful memory aids and framing the topic in an accessible way. The key ideas will probably be new at first, and their implications may be surprising, especially for people living in the West. They are the notion of the WEIRD and non-WEIRD parts of the world, and MINE and OURS styles of emotion.

I’ll start by explaining what we mean by the WEIRD and non-WEIRD world, which will lead us to the distinction between MINE and OURS emotions. We’ll then cover some history of MINE emotions in the WEIRD world, and finish by considering the influence of this view in the modern day. If you’re interested in this topic and you’d like to learn more, you’ll find references to recommended books throughout the series.

The WEIRD and non-WEIRD worlds

WEIRD is an acronym that’s recently come into use. It refers to people from countries that are Western, Educated, Industralised, Rich and Democratic. The WEIRD world represents a minority of the global human population, as it only includes Western Europe and the so-called Anglosphere: Australia, New Zealand, the US, Canada, and the UK, depending on whether or not you lump the UK in with Western Europe.

Everything not in the WEIRD world is part of the non-WEIRD world, which includes Asia, Eastern Europe, Africa, and Latin America. All told, the WEIRD world represents no more than roughly 15% of the human population, while the remaining 85% or more live in the non-WEIRD world.

As it turns out, people in the WEIRD world also have some psychological traits that make them very unusual by the standards of most of humankind, including with respect to emotions. For these reasons, as an acronym, the term WEIRD is very apt.

MINE and OURS emotions

The difference between how people perceive emotions in the WEIRD and non-WEIRD worlds boils down to whether they use what researchers call a MINE or OURS model of emotion. In the WEIRD world, MINE emotions are the norm. In the non-WEIRD world, OURS emotions are the norm. MINE emotions are Mental, Internal, and Essentialist.

This should be familiar to people in the WEIRD world, as it means that emotions are thought of as events that occur inside your body and mind, and are caused by an essence that defines the experience. This idea is captured nicely by the movie Inside Out, where emotions are viewed as little entities living inside us that influence our thoughts, feelings and behaviours.

This is the dominant way that people in the WEIRD world understand emotions, as we’ll see when we discuss the history of MINE emotions in a moment. In contrast, OURS emotions depend on the degree to which a person’s behaviour is compatible with the expectations placed on them by their culture. OURS emotions are found Outside the person; they are Relational, as they depend on your relationships with others; and they are Situational, as they depend on the dynamics of the situation in which you find yourself.

This is the dominant way that people in the non-WEIRD world (i.e., the vast majority of the human population) understand emotions. If you’re from the WEIRD world and the OURS model of emotions doesn’t make sense as I just described it, don’t worry, because in the next article we’ll go through some examples to clarify what exactly OURS emotions look like. Today, however, we’ll briefly describe the history of MINE emotions in the WEIRD world, and sketch out how this history has shaped WEIRD cultures and societies.

A brief history of MINE emotions in the WEIRD world

It seems like everything in the WEIRD world has a history going back to the ancient Greeks, and emotions are another case in point. The ancient Greeks thought of emotions, or what they called passions, as separate from our capacity to reason. For people like Plato and Aristotle, the capacity to reason is what distinguishes humans from mere beasts.

They viewed emotions as part of our own primitive, animalistic nature, an aspect of ourselves that could corrupt reason or be suppressed by it. Plato described reason as a charioteer guiding two horses: one white, representing noble impulses; and one black, representing wicked impulses. In this view, the job of reason is to wrangle these inner forces of good and evil and steer us towards rational behaviour. Aristotle had similar ideas in mind when he argued that “The law is reason free from passion”.

In the WEIRD world, the views of the ancient Greeks disappeared during the Medieval period, also known as the Dark Ages. In this time, people in the Medieval West understood all of nature from the perspective of Christian religious beliefs, and Greco-Roman ideas became less relevant or were entirely forgotten.

However, the views of the Ancient Greek revived after the rediscovery of Greco-Roman culture during the Renaissance and Enlightenment, and have been very influential ever since. For example, the fingerprints of their arguments are found in Freud’s thinking, which included the ‘id’, responsible for primitive instincts (Plato’s dark horse); the ‘superego’, responsible for morality (Plato’s noble horse); and the ‘ego’, responsible for negotiating between the id and superego (Plato’s charioteer).

Although Freud was a prominent figure in the modern history of psychology, his ideas haven’t withstood the test of time, and many of them are now widely seen as obviously ridiculous. However, the ancient Greek distinction between reason and passions that influenced Freud remains alive and well, and even has legal force in many WEIRD jurisdictions, as we see with so-called ‘crimes of passion’.

This is an argument with genuine legal standing, where a person who committed a crime claims that they were antagonised into it by some provocation, and that any reasonable person would’ve done the same thing in their situation. If the judge and/or jury are sympathetic to a crimes-of-passion defence, this can determine how the individual is sentenced. This is accepted as a valid legal argument because people in the WEIRD world generally agree with the ancient Greek view that reason is corrupted by passions/emotions.

Consistent with this framing, people in the WEIRD world subscribe to a MINE model of emotions, in which our thoughts, feelings and behaviours are shaped by internal emotion states. That’s why the premise behind Inside Out is so intuitive for WEIRDos, including myself. Clearly, the arguments of people like Plato and Aristotle have echoed to the present, with major implications for how people in the WEIRD world understand human beings, and the legal standards by which people’s actions are judged.

Next time

With that history in mind, next time we’ll dive into the differences between MINE and OURS emotions. We’ll discuss the role of feelings, mental states, behaviours, and cultural norms in creating emotion concepts, and how this varies between the WEIRD and non-WEIRD worlds. Thanks for reading!