A closer look at different types of emotion concepts
A brief overview of MINE emotions in the WEIRD world, and OURS emotions in the non-WEIRD world
Last time, we were introduced to the WEIRD and non-WEIRD worlds, and heard how they differ psychologically. This includes the way they understand emotions, with MINE emotions in the WEIRD world, and OURS emotions in the non-WEIRD world. Today, we’ll take a closer look at this distinction, and cover some examples of OURS emotions from different cultures to try and clarify the concept.
The key differences between MINE and OURS emotions
In the WEIRD world, where we see reason and emotions as separate but interacting faculties of the mind, the MINE model of emotions prevails. We view emotions like happiness, disgust, surprise, sadness, fear and anger as inner forces that shape the way we feel, act and think. You can find many examples of this in popular culture, most clearly in cases like the movie Inside Out.
By contrast, in the non-WEIRD world, where the OURS model of emotions is the norm, emotions are not primarily identified with a person’s private, internal experience. Instead, emotions emerge from social situations and the relationships between the people involved, with cultural expectations superimposed on top.
People with an OURS model still have feelings, of course, which are a direct experience of your body. However, the difference between MINE and OURS emotions is all about what’s in the foreground versus the background, and how people perceive the relationship between mind and behaviour.
In MINE emotions, a person’s private, internal feelings are in the foreground, whereas the cultural expectations of appropriate behaviour are in the background. In extreme cases, cultural expectations may be totally ignored, no doubt the cause of many regrets.
In OURS emotions, the opposite is true, as the foreground is dominated by cultural expectations of how you’re meant to behave given the situation you’re in and your relationships with the people involved. The focus is on behaviour, and internal feelings are relegated to the background or ignored entirely. A person with an OURS model has a body that will generate feelings, but those feelings are less relevant, or even totally irrelevant, to the person’s experience of emotion.
Another important difference is whether people try to infer mental states from observing another person’s actions. People with a MINE model try to infer mental states from behaviour, whereas people with an OURS model pay less attention to mental states or ignore them entirely. This means that accusations of resting bitch face are mostly a WEIRD phenomenon. If that’s difficult to wrap your head around, there’s a good chance you’re WEIRD.
Some examples of OURS emotions
For the WEIRDos in the crowd, let’s take a look at some examples of OURS emotions from different cultures to help clarify its meaning. These examples come from a recent book, published in 2022 by the Dutch cross-cultural emotions researcher, Batja Mesquita. Her book is called Between Us, and I highly recommend it to anyone interested in emotions. In it, she describes how OURS models of emotion are common in Indonesia, like among the Minangkabau people. She quotes anthropologist Karl Heider, who worked with the Minangkabau and noted:
“[i]n comparison with Americans, for whom the internal experience of emotion is very important, Minangkabau more commonly emphasize the external aspects of emotion, focusing on the implications of emotion for interpersonal interactions and relationships.” — Mesquita, Between Us, p. 31
In a different part of Indonesia, people on Java exemplify this with respect to the emotion ‘isin’, translated as ‘shame’. Mesquita quotes another anthropologist, Andrew Beatty, who explains that:
“Isin is not used to describe feelings, not even emotional behaviours (or “expressions”), but rather a norm for behaviour given a certain set of circumstances. Adults encourage children to align their emotional behaviours with the social norms; again, the attention is outward to OURS emotions, not inward to private feelings.” — Mesquita, Between Us, p. 39
Similar examples are also found in Africa, such as among the Himba people of Namibia. When shown an image of people laughing and asked to describe what they see, the Himba didn’t use MINE emotion concepts like happy or excited to describe internal feelings or mental states. Instead, people from the Himba focused on the behaviour itself, giving answers like “all laughing”.
These cases show how non-WEIRD cultures with OURS emotions stress the social and cultural aspects of emotion concepts, and diminish or even completely ignore internal feelings and mental states. They also demonstrate the power of cultural expectations in defining emotion concepts.
Moving over to Japan, we can see how emotions are thought to emerge from the entire group rather than just the individual. In studies, Japanese and American university students were shown an image with a target person in the middle of the foreground and a row of other people in the background. When asked to judge the happiness or anger of the target person, American students looked only at the target person, and judged their emotions based solely on their facial expression.
By contrast, Japanese students looked at both the target person and the people in the background, and took the facial expressions of the background people into account when judging the anger or happiness of the target person. To the Japanese, a smiling person was less happy (and more angry) when surrounded by people frowning, and more happy (and less angry) when surrounded by people smiling.
Another distinction between MINE and OURS emotions is the role of emotion concepts in socialisation. Socialisation is the process by which we become part of our mother culture — or enculturated, in the psychology jargon. Socialisation is essential in the WEIRD and non-WEIRD worlds, as humans are a social species that depends on relationships with others for survival.
In the WEIRD world, where emotion concepts refer to private, internal feelings and related mental states, socialisation involves becoming fluent in these concepts and learning to square your internal states with the cultural expectations of your behaviour – two potent forces that may not always lead in the same direction. In the non-WEIRD world, where emotion concepts refer to norms of behaviour given cultural expectations, emotion concepts act like scripts for proper behaviour.
As a result, emotion concepts like shame and fear can take on roles that have little to do with feelings and mental states, and more to do with demonstrating cultural competence. Describing the work of anthropologist Heidi Fung, Batja Mesquita talks about the role of shame as a socialising emotion in Taiwan:
“The anthropologist Heidi Fung found that Taiwanese mothers cultivated shame in similar manners [to cultivation of pride in WEIRD countries]. They took and created opportunities for children to feel shame. The mother of three-year-old Didi, a Taiwanese toddler, scolded him when he approached the researcher’s camcorder: “Eh, eh, Didi! What has mama told you? You never [listen] … You cannot! I’m going to spank you. You are a child who doesn’t obey rules.” She threatened to ostracize him and put him aside: “We don’t want you; you stand here.” And she told him to control himself: “Look how ugly your crying will be on tape.” Didi’s sister joined in, calling him “ugly monster” and adding “shame on you.” Fung assures us that shaming was not intended to harm or ostracize the child, but rather to “transmit the cultural values of discretion shame […] teaching children how to be part of society, to include them rather than set them apart.” … Didi’s mother wanted to teach her child propriety, as valued in Taiwanese contexts; the norm for Didi was to be aware of his proper place, by feeling shame. … In short, emotions help us become part of our culture.” — Mesquita, Between Us, p. 55–56
Similarly, the Bara people of southern Madagascar use fear as a socialising emotion:
“A central goal of socialization among the Bara in the southern part of Madagascar is to be docile. … The ideal behaviour for Bara children is to be docile, submissive, and compliant with anything their elders want them to do. Bara children are made to follow the directives of their elders without protest. To that end, they should “know tahotsy, that is, they should readily fear their elder relatives.” Fear, according to anthropologist Birgitt Röttger-Rössler and developmental psychologist Manfred Holodynski, is the socializing emotion.” — Mesquita, Between Us, p. 64
In the WEIRD world, a person who spends much of their time in fear may be in danger or need mental health support, and a person living in shame may be guilty of seriously violating cultural norms. In the WEIRD world, fear and shame are to be avoided, or at least minimised, as much as possible.
In contrast, fear and shame can play valued and powerful socialising roles in non-WEIRD cultures with an OURS model of emotions. This shows again the power of culture to shape emotions: even when people from different cultures use the same emotion concept, like fear and shame, the experience of those emotions will vary if the emotion concepts have different implications across cultures.
We’ve spoken in broad strokes and given only a handful of examples that can’t cover the full diversity of emotion concepts in the non-WEIRD world. Still, I hope these examples help to demonstrate the way OURS emotions differ from MINE emotions. The distinction between foreground and background is crucial. MINE emotions emphasise internal feelings and mental states, whereas OURS emotions emphasise behaviours and cultural norms. One is not inherently right or wrong, but the WEIRD view is the exception, not the rule.
Since that’s the case, it’s interesting to note that most psychological research done to date has been heavily dominated by WEIRD participants. In fact, about 97% of all studies focus on WEIRD psychology, even though the WEIRD world is only ~12% of the global population. In consequence, our view of human psychology has been strongly biased by the WEIRDness of the participants involved in most psychological research, an issue that the field is currently coming to terms with.
Next time
We’ve now covered the key aspects of MINE and OURS emotions. With this in hand, next time we’ll move on to a question that remains controversial among researchers: are emotions innate? Until then!
