Q.How does culture influence the expression of emotions?

Culture shapes both how openly emotion is outwardly expressed (e.g., gaze behaviour, gestures) and how finely it is categorised and labelled in language, even though the basic facial expressions themselves appear largely universal. …

Emotion is an internal experience that others can only infer through the verbal and non-verbal ways it is expressed. While the core biological machinery behind expressing basic emotions appears to be universal and inborn, the social conventions surrounding how, and how much, emotion should be displayed are strongly shaped by culture — in at least two distinct ways: differences in outward behavioural expression, and differences in how emotions are labelled in language.

On the expressive side, research has found clear cultural differences in something as basic as gaze behaviour: Latin Americans and Southern Europeans tend to direct their gaze straight into a conversation partner's eyes, while Indians and Pakistanis tend to prefer a peripheral gaze, looking somewhat away rather than maintaining steady eye contact. Bodily movement and gesture are similarly shaped by cultural training — classical Indian dance forms such as Bharatanatyam, Odissi, Kuchipudi and Kathak train dancers in a very specific grammar of eye, leg and finger movement to communicate emotions like joy, sorrow, love and anger to an audience.

On the labelling side, cultures differ enormously in how finely they categorise emotion in language: Tahitian has 46 separate words corresponding to the English word "anger"; North American respondents produced 40 distinct anger-labels and 81 contempt-labels; Japanese respondents produced 10 labels for happiness, 8 for anger, and 6 for disgust; ancient Chinese literature names seven basic emotions while ancient Indian literature identifies eight, both differing from the five or six emotions most commonly treated as universal in Western psychology. …