Cultural perspectives in emotions research
We invite research that explores the role of cultural perspectives in emotions research, with the aim of advancing interdisciplinary dialogue on how emotions are experienced, interpreted, and expressed across diverse cultural contexts. Research is particularly welcomed that challenges prevailing assumptions and encourages innovative methods and frameworks for understanding emotions as deeply embedded in sociocultural life.
Traditional paradigms in psychological science have often operated under the assumption of the universality of emotions, suggesting that core emotional experiences are biologically ‘hardwired’ and expressed similarly across cultures. However, growing critiques from cultural psychology, anthropology, and affect studies challenge this notion, emphasising that emotional experiences and their meanings are shaped by history, politics, religion, language, and local epistemologies, among other factors.
Research is invited on a range of themes, including but not limited, to:
- The cultural variability of emotional concepts, including how emotions develop different reputations, connotations, and moral valuations in various cultural contexts
- Theoretical and empirical critiques of the hardwiring/universality paradigm, and new models of emotion that incorporate social construction, relationality, and context
- Cross-cultural and comparative studies of emotional expression, regulation, and recognition
- The challenges of measuring cultural effects on emotion through both quantitative and qualitative approaches
- Emotions as individual, attitudinal, and interpersonal phenomena, including how emotional norms regulate behaviour and identity within social systems
- The value and limitations of self-reporting, physiological data, and behavioural observation in culturally diverse contexts
- Use of narratives, oral traditions, songs, myths, and historical texts to interrogate cultural understandings of emotional life
- Studies exploring how emotional norms are transmitted through institutions, such as family, education, religion, and media
- The interaction between language, emotion categories, and emotional granularity across linguistic-cultural boundaries
- Contributions from indigenous knowledge systems, postcolonial perspectives, and historically marginalised cultural frameworks
- Cultural variations in group-based and/or collective emotions
- Research addressing the relations between affects and emotions within and across cultures.
- Research into media studies, and the impact of the media on how we express and share emotions
We welcome submissions from psychology, anthropology, sociology, philosophy, linguistics, literature, religious studies, and related fields. Interdisciplinary and cross-methodological work is especially encouraged.
Studies primarily clinical or neuroscience in focus will be considered out of scope.
