The Role of Cultural Meanings and Situated Interaction in Shaping Emotion

Cultures, institutions, and social roles powerfully shape affective experience. Four types of social affect—cultural sentiments, characteristic emotions, structural emotions, and consequent emotions—characterize relations between culture, social structure, and individual affective experience within social interactions. This article briefly reviews findings from contemporary research traditions about these forms of affect and finishes with simulations comparing predictions about social emotions across cultures. The results of that simulation study illustrate how we might use data and tools from affect control theory to investigate differences in basic cultural sentiments, as well as predictions about the core types of social emotions—those associated with identities, those associated with structural relationships, and those evoked by a social event.