[MUSIC] Hi. Welcome again. In this session, we will talk about the geography of emotions and the distinction between guilt and shame cultures. Do you think that we can talk about geographical distribution of, of how people feel emotions? I think that, that the work, the question is very strange and a fast answer to this question and really guided by the common sense is, no. No, it's nothing like that, must they, must be universal and everybody must really react following si, similar patterns. But the truth is that, that it's not the case because culture shapes, really, the emotional performance and als, even that the emotional experience. That the internal experience of what is an emotion and, and which, which is the meaning of this experience. In the same way that we can affirm that exists a geography of thought. That affect the cognitive performance of human beings, that, things that have, has, have been demonstrated by cultural psychologists, like Richard, Richard Nisbett. In a very, very nice book called The Geography of Thought: How Asians and Westerns Westerners Think Differently and Why. We can really affirm that there is a geography of feelings and emotions. And how we can know this? Thanks to the studies of anthropology, anthropologists. There are several authors, really interesting. I think that David Le Breton is a very interesting researcher and also Catherine Lutz. Talking about in, unnatural emotions. But. The truth is that how we think our emotions, how can we describe our emotions, thanks to language? because, as, as said Martin Heidegger language is the house of being. It's, it's the place in which we can understand that we are living. It's not just just an experience. It's the knowledge about experience and the des, description about our experience. So language shapes whatever we are feeling and whatever are we processing and, and at the same time, we are tagging that information and classifying emotionally. And adding value and more, even more, adding more values to that kind of experience. So, it's then important to understand that, that, language is the, is the place in which we know that we are. At the same time, language, it's really constrained by the culture in which, in which this language is performed. Or even deciding the structure of, of, and, and the architecture of this language. Of, for all the previous reasons I am working with real researcher in Japan called [FOREIGN] about the notion of situated phenomenology. But this is a different topic. So, the idea is that language shapes emotions and at the same time, shapes cognition. In the 19th century started a real interest on, on, on how language really described that the, the spirit of a, of a nation. The, the spirit of a community of human beings. These evolve and we arrive to the 20th century in which the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis was created. Trying to describe how the the language structure affect the way in which the speakers are con, conceptualizing the world. So, we can see and, and we can really understand that language, really produce specific ways of, of processing feelings. And to order these feelings, these linguistic feelings and these linguistic expressions in a grammatically way. And finally, all these areas are, are really flavored by cultural values and, and beliefs. So, if we try to speak about something like the anthropology of emotions, we can see that they're not really very strong across cultural regularities. Despite of the, the, the researches of Ekman and talking about something like a neuroculture and ob, obviously exists a, a, a genetic basis. And even our, our bodily architecture that, that explains basic tendencies among humans. The truth is that according to all, all, different ways of studies in, in, on the anthropology emotions. From ethnopsychology, social structural, linguistic even evolutionary studies. We can see and, and all the ethnographic studies demonstrate as that emotions are just one cultural idiom for dealing with the persistent problems problems of social relationship. So emotions are ideological, despite of really very clear bodily or natural precultural emotions. And, and I can remind you the, the, de, debate on the, on the classification of emotions and, and even my statement on the, on the existence of proud emotions. Bu,t it really basic emotions in spite of all these things, we can see that, that emotions are really running into a social sphere. And emotions are really basic for the moral relationship among, among individuals. So it's very interesting to discover, at least for you I think, that there exist cultures of guilt, and cultures of shame. Some cultures try to make that the individuals that are living in, in that, area, feel in a specific way, when happens something. It, it just, it's true for all human communities. For example, guilt cultures, like Western countries, [COUGH] are really individualistic despite of any kind of social relationship and families, and blah, blah, blah. The truth is that our family interconnection and then the social interconnections are much more weaker than those that are really existing into the Eastern societies. Which are m, really more interdependent. Yeah? So in, in Western societies people is more prone to fe to feel themselves guilt. By the contrary in, Eastern cou, countries, people is closer to, to feel themselves shame because of they're result of their actions. Because they are more aware of the social interaction in which their actions are evaluated. So, we can finish this lesson. Affirming that emotions are really culturally laden. Language really shapes the ways by which we feel. And finally, socio-emotional strategies determine how humans really behave individually as well as socially. Thank you so much for being here. Bye.
