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  • Perspective
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The cultural evolution of emotion

Nature Reviews Psychology volume 1, pages 669–681 (2022)Cite this article

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Abstract

Scholarly debates about the nature of human emotion traditionally pit biological and cultural influences against one another. Although many existing theories acknowledge the role of culture, they mostly treat emotion categories such as ‘anger’ as biological products. In this Perspective, we summarize traditional assumptions about the roles of biology and culture in emotion alongside supporting and conflicting empirical evidence. Building on constructionist models of emotion, we introduce a cultural evolutionary perspective that moves beyond a strict biology-versus-culture dichotomy. This cultural evolutionary perspective uses dual inheritance models of cultural transmission to explain how variation in emotion can arise across groups, how affect-laden information can travel throughout populations, and why people in different cultures use both similar and different emotion concepts and non-verbal expressions. This cultural evolution framework allows for new hypotheses about the development of emotion categories and challenges longstanding claims about the universality of emotion.

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Fig. 1: A constructionist framework of emotion representation.
Fig. 2: The impact of social learning on emotion across development.
Fig. 3: Cultural evolutionary mechanisms of emotion.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychology and Neuroscience, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, NC, USA

    Kristen A. Lindquist & Joseph Leshin

  2. Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, USA

    Joshua Conrad Jackson

  3. Department of Psychology, Northeastern University, Boston, MA, USA

    Ajay B. Satpute

  4. Department of Psychology, Yale University, New Haven, CT, USA

    Maria Gendron

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CLICS: https://clics.clld.org/

Common Crawl: https://commoncrawl.org/

Concepticon: https://concepticon.clld.org/

Context-facial behaviour correlations: https://github.com/google/context-expression-nature-study

D-PLACE: https://d-place.org/

eHRAF World Cultures: https://ehrafworldcultures.yale.edu/ehrafe/

Ethnographic Atlas: https://d-place.org/contributions/EA

Gallup analytics: https://www.gallup.com/analytics/318923/world-poll-public-datasets.aspx

Gallup 2017 Global Emotions Report: https://news.gallup.com/reports/212678/2017-global-emotions-report.aspx

Glottolog: https://glottolog.org/

Historical long-migration heterogeneity and emotional behaviour: https://osf.io/d96p8/?view_only=4a5412be597e4e8cb71650cbc36e7784

Historical Migration Data: https://www.migrationpolicy.org/programs/migration-data-hub

Natural History of Song: https://osf.io/jmv3q/

Open Science Framework: https://osf.io/hvcg3/

World Loanword Database: https://wold.clld.org/

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Lindquist, K.A., Jackson, J.C., Leshin, J. et al. The cultural evolution of emotion. Nat Rev Psychol 1, 669–681 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s44159-022-00105-4

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