The most profound understanding of the relation of culture to psychology and emotional response starts from defining a culture, which is varied across nations and studies. It represents the rules and norms defining a particular group and arises as people become more socialized and depend on the companionship of others. It affects emotions when providing information systems and governing codes of conduct, requiring an emotional response from people.
Culture affects emotions through front-end calibration, regulating emotional responses to culturally available events. It means that it identifies what culturally specific events in a person’s life make people the most emotional, proving that the emotional system is adaptable to particular external conflicts (Matsumoto & Juang, 2016). Everything people learn through experience that causes joy or sadness originates from culture. In other cases, culture affects the way people express their emotions.
The intensity of emotion and its physiological expression are examples of how different cultures affect emotions. My family’s culture promotes the idea of an interdependent self, thus forcing me to more suppressed cultural display rules. When feeling bitterness, I tend to express less than I feel. The cause of such deamplification is that my family, as an organization with its own culture, prefers being more logical than emotional and more observant than judgemental (Matsumoto & Juang, 2016). Sometimes, it results in neutralization, limiting my emotions, or masking. Thus, a person’s daily emotional responses arise according to the culture surrounding him.
To conclude, people as the parts of the bigger society refer to culture as the source of norms and expectations. Some culture-specific distinctions are more concerned with emotional responses, regulating them in daily life. Culture dictates when certain feelings are allowed and regulates the expression after emotions are elicited. As my family does, a small group also has a culture that appropriates its members’ behavior and emotional responses.
Reference
Matsumoto. D., & Juang, L. (2016). Culture and Psychology (6th ed). Z-Library. Web.