Feel Better, Live More with Dr Rangan Chatterjee - What We All Need To Know About Human Emotions & How They Affect Our Behaviour with Batja Mesquita #344

Episode Date: March 15, 2023

Are emotions universal? Do you think people are programmed to feel a certain way in specific situations? Or is there a clear distinction between what makes you feel angry, happy or sad, compared to someone else? Today’s guest is someone whose work I believe can help all of us to make better connections in a fractured, modern world. Batja Mesquita is a social psychologist, affective scientist, and pioneer of cultural psychology. She’s also a Professor of Psychology at the University of Leuven in Belgium and in her ground-breaking book, Between Us: How Cultures Create Emotions, she suggests emotions don’t live within us, they arise between us. They are made, not innate; they form in response to social interaction and can differ dramatically across societies and cultures. That’s not, of course, to deny our emotions are authentic – or to say that we don’t feel them deeply. Rather it’s a way to acknowledge that not everyone will see the same situation in the same way. We can probably all think of occasions where someone from another culture has responded unusually to us – or where our own behaviour has been misunderstood by them. In this conversation, Batja gives examples of how, as a Dutch academic visiting America, she found her colleagues’ culture of compliments uncomfortable and overfamiliar. She explains that it’s not about our language, although the words we choose to describe our feelings can be significant. Instead, says Batja, our culture, heritage, gender, socioeconomic group or even age influences how we interpret the world – and so what our emotional norms are in a given situation. We cover so many thought-provoking topics, including: What emotions really are – and why anger, shame or pride might differ across cultures. Parenting and how we understand and influence our child’s emotions. The immigrant experience and how being raised with dual cultures might affect your relationships and approach to life. How a better understanding of cultural differences and language interpretation could help doctor-patient relationships. I absolutely loved Batja’s book and I think her work is really important. The more we are able to connect with our fellow humans instead of judging them, the happier and more harmonious the world is going to be. I hope you enjoy listening. Support the podcast and enjoy Ad-Free episodes. Try FREE for 7 days on Apple Podcasts https://apple.co/feelbetterlivemore. For other podcast platforms go to https://fblm.supercast.com. Thanks to our sponsors: https://www.vivobarefoot.com/livemore https://www.athleticgreens.com/livemore Show notes https://drchatterjee.com/344 DISCLAIMER: The content in the podcast and on this webpage is not intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of your doctor or qualified healthcare provider with any questions you may have. Never disregard professional medical advice or delay in seeking it because of something you have heard on the podcast or on my website.

The idea that you need to follow your own goals and values and you need to achieve those goals and be motivated and have some individual agency. Those are cultural ideas. Not everywhere do people think that their goals are going to be met. Western individualism in general, I think if you're doing well as an individual, it gives you a lot of liberty. doing well as an individual, it gives you a lot of liberty, but it also makes people much more vulnerable because if they don't do well individually, there's not a network that takes care of them as much. First time occurrence of depression is no different across cultures, but second time depression is actually more common in Western cultures. That is because if you are depressed in individualist cultures, the scaffolding is gone. Hey guys, how you doing? Hope you're having a good week so far.

My name is Dr. Rangan Chatterjee, and this is my podcast, Feel Better, Live More. Do you think that all emotions are universal? Do you think people are programmed to feel a certain way in specific situations? Or is there a clear distinction between what makes you feel angry, happy, or sad compared to someone else? Well, today's guest is someone whose work, Well, today's guest is someone whose work I believe can help all of us make better connections in a fractured modern world. Batcha Mosquita is a social psychologist, an effective scientist, and a pioneer of cultural psychology. She's also a professor of psychology at the University of Leuven in Belgium, and in her groundbreaking book

Between Us, How Cultures Create Emotions, she suggests that emotions don't live within us, they actually arise between us. They are made, not innate. They form in response to social interactions and can differ dramatically across societies and cultures. That's not of course to deny that our emotions are authentic or to say that we don't feel them deeply. Rather, it's a way to acknowledge that not everyone will see the same situation in the same way. will see the same situation in the same way. Now, we could probably all think of occasions where someone from another culture has perhaps responded unusually to us or where our own behavior has been misunderstood. And in our conversation, Batya shares some personal examples. For example, how as a Dutch academic visiting America, She found her colleagues' culture of compliments uncomfortable and over-familiar compared to what she was used to.

Now, Batchett explains how it's not necessarily our language, although the words we choose to describe our feelings can, of course, be significant. Instead, she says that things like our culture, our heritage, our gender, our socioeconomic group All influence how we interpret the world And what our emotional norms are in any given situation We cover so many thought-provoking topics in our conversation Including what exactly emotions are And why anger, shame or pride might differ across cultures. We talk

about parenting and what we can do to better understand and potentially influence our child's emotions. We also discuss the immigrant experience and how being raised with dual cultures might affect our own relationships and our approach to life. And we also cover how better understanding cultural differences could have a transformative effect on doctor-patient relationships. Now, I fell in love with Batch's book the moment I started reading it. I think her work is really, really important. The more we are able to connect with our fellow humans instead of judging them, the happier and more harmonious the world is going to be.

I really enjoyed my conversation with Batya. I hope you enjoyed listening. And now, my conversation with Batya Mosquita. with Batcha Mosquita. I love it when you come across someone and their ideas and their research that really makes you think about the way you're living your life. It's really made me think about the way I parent. But one of the other things I really like

is that it's helped give a language to certain things that I feel I've intuitively felt for a while about the world and yeah I appreciate you making the journey over. Thank you it's wonderful to be here. I thought we'd start with something I once heard you say, which is when you moved to America, you found yourself out of sync with your US counterparts. What do you mean by that? You know, I think I didn't feel I fully understood how they responded. And let me give you some examples.

I mean, they're simple examples. They're not deep examples. But people were really excited about seeing me. And I felt like I was a little, I was a little rough on the edges. I wasn't really excited back enough. I also didn't know if that was, you know, if that was a way of doing. I just felt I wasn't, people were very generous and I didn't feel I was grateful enough or thankful enough. So there was something about it that at that point I didn't really understand. And then interestingly, when people were grateful to me or praised me, I also didn't know how to respond. So praise for me was hard to take. And I obviously didn't. I mean, it has to be reciprocated, I think, in a particular way in the United States,

and I didn't. And you basically, you have to sort of like it, go with it, accept it in, you know, in acknowledgement. What I, I was, it really made me embarrassed. So I looked at the floor and I said, I'm not that great. Or, you know, that's a little exaggerated. For a little bit of context, can you explain to us your background? You know, where were you born? Where were your parents from because i think that will help contextualize yes what happened when you went to america definitely um my i was

born in the netherlands um i grew up mostly i was born in amsterdam i grew up in a place ain't over where my dad worked for phillips i think that's what it's known for. So I was thoroughly Dutch, and the Dutch are known to be very forward. I mean, also I think in the UK there is a different style of just saying what you mean, not making it big, you know, do act normal. You're good enough when you're average. That was an expression my mom used, act normal. The doctor also direct in the sense that I don't think there is a lot of, you know, there isn't a lot of praise. It's, you know, when you don't hear criticism, then it's okay.

So it's a very, it's a kind of a straightforward way of interacting and engaging with each other. And you tell people what's on your mind. And that's often what you don't like or what doesn't sit well with you. I mean, you can also say this was nice or we have a good time together mostly. But praising somebody or elevating somebody, that's not part of the – it's part of the dietary repertoire. Of course, you can do it. You can imagine. But it's not what we usually do.

And so what I describe in the book is that I, you know, it just didn't feel, it just wasn't what I expected to happen in interactions. And I felt like I didn't play my part of the script or I didn't make the steps of the dance correctly yeah it's it's so interesting um there's two particular incidents i remember from researching your work i've been listening to you in interviews i'll be reading your book and one particular incident was when I think you said you got to America and one of your friends you went to a shop with and they asked the storekeeper, how are you? And you said, oh, do you know them? Yeah, I did ask her that. And she said, no, she said, how are you? And the person said, oh, I'm doing great.

What about you? And I thought this was, you know, I couldn't imagine that you would just do that to each other. It was completely over the top for me. Yeah. Now, I just actually had a joint lab meeting, we call it, with a Japanese colleague and her students. And one of her students asked me, is that emotions? Isn't that just, you know, social norms, the way she... And, you know, there are many answers to that question.

But one of the answers is, no, people really try to elicit different feelings in each other. So the feeling of being seen, being made special at every time of the day and by anyone, basically, is a kind of social interaction goal that we don't have in the Netherlands, not in that way. Yeah, it's interesting hearing you say that. Of course, there's many different components to culture and our norms. I think the British also find that component of American culture different. I think as you were saying, as you were describing that, how are you? We might regard it here as over the top but i say that without judgment i say that with an understanding that actually different cultures are different and i know your book between us how cultures create emotions it is really key here

we're going to get to all of that because i i really think your work is going to help create more acceptance, empathy and understanding of people who see the world differently from us, right? I think that's a key point. The other example I think is really powerful was when you invited some of your colleagues back to your house for dinner. And you thought things were going great until the end of the evening so I wonder if you could share that story yeah so so at the end of the evening um they thanked me and you know you could think what's wrong with thanking somebody but I felt that as them taking distance so I I really felt it was more than a collegial dinner party. I thought we were really about to become friends. It was intimate. We had a lot of fun. And when they thanked me, that for me turned it into a kind of a formal interaction. And so I was very disappointed

that they thanked me because I thought that that was at the exclusion of, you know, feeling connected or feeling friends. Which goes to show you again that what we had at that point was we were interacting at cross purposes, right? to feel close and connected and their purpose was to somehow make me exclusive or to um to acknowledge my special efforts into the evening yeah you know what's incredible about hearing that is that actually you enjoy the, your colleagues enjoyed the evening, but the way that enjoyment was expressed actually caused a bit of disharmony, unintentionally. So as you say, your colleagues are just trying to say, hey, thanks so much, appreciate the effort you've gone through, you've had us around, thank you.

And so to them, they're thinking, thinking the intention was we want to make bachelor feel included you know she is a friend she's just moved over whatever it might have been the impact of their actions obviously was different though and as I hear that that is just one example of hundreds thousands thousands, tens of thousands, millions of things that are going on right now every single day across the world where people have the right intention, but the impact of that intention is completely different. So what's going on here? I mean, this is the heart of your work, really, isn't it? How would you help us kind of put all that together? heart of your work really isn't it you know how would you help us kind of put all that together well all of that i don't know if i can put together but some of it is i think that you know even though i agree with you that everybody wanted to be inclusive whatever that meant and it meant different things for different people i still think that in the moment what was most important was different.

And that's not, you know, that's not that the people who thanked me didn't want to become friends with me. So in that sense, you're right. It's unintended misunderstandings. But it was a different emphasis on what was important in the moment. And what was important was that I had taken care of the food for them, they may have been similar. But short-term, I think what was salient in that situation may actually have been meaningfully different. That's not to say that, you know, when I say, when some of my friends read the book, they said, and I want to take back the many thank yous for dinners that you've prepared

for us, both in North Carolina and in Brussels. So, you know, it's not that you can't communicate about it. And that, of course, is the hopeful message of the book, is that you can try to find out what is important for other people and you can communicate about it. Just like I have, for other people and you can communicate about it. Just like I have, I no longer take it as an offense when people thank me for dinner. I think, oh, they liked the food. So, I mean, there are ways in which you can, and this is in a way an innocuous example

and that's why it's interesting to give it because even though it was innocuous, the friendship resumed, we got over it. In that moment, you're right, it distanced us. What's interesting for me is that at that time when you had moved to America, you had already been studying the cultural difference of emotions. So it wasn't as if you weren't aware of this. And I think there's a peaceful phrase you use in the book. I think it speaks to this area, which was, you were blindfolded by your culturally informed ideas about what emotions really were.

I mean, that blows my mind because it's even with that knowledge, the cultural imprint on us and how we think and how we feel is so big that you may have known it somewhere, but it didn't change anything. You still felt upset that they had thanked you. Yeah, and I would say that that really only, so I did my first research, I did in the Netherlands with minority groups in the Netherlands, Turkish labor migrants and Surinamese, you know, they were, Suriname was a former colony of the Netherlands. And, you know, it was really interesting. I did describe, I think, with some insight, what was different about their emotions. And I never looked at the Dutch emotions. I only took the Dutch emotions. I mean, I looked at them, and I considered them a kind of the standard against which you compare the other emotions. So I really was into the othering. And I don't think I was

necessarily negative about those cultures. I mean, I really tried to describe them, but that my own culture, my own emotions were a topic that needed understanding and that they were cultures that came years later um and really was helped by the fact that i encountered the differences every day in my everyday life yeah one of the big ideas in your work for me at least is that there is no universal signature to emotions. And I want to just spend a bit of time here because I think many people will come to this podcast, whether they're listening or watching, with the idea that happiness is happiness, anger is anger, right? These are universal emotions that start off inside us and that we all feel them. Doesn't matter where we're

from, how we were raised, we feel the same things. It's not that accurate, is it? I don't think so. You know, I agree with you that that's how most people, especially in the West, people, especially in the West, view emotions. And it's almost as if you could look through the skull, you would see them there, you know, active or not active. And it's, I don't know, for people who have seen the movie Inside Out, with the little characters there, they were always there, sometimes they came in action, but they basically always did more or less the same. Now, I don't think of emotions as things, and I don't think that's really a productive way of thinking about them. What happens when you have emotions is, when you have emotions is let's take a child, a five-year-old child at the beach, Jane, a toddler.

And her parents say, it's time to go now. And Jane is frustrated. She gets what we might call angry. And the parents say, okay, Jane, I see you don't want to go. Let's play five more minutes and then we need to go. Now, Jane goes back to playing and then after five minutes, when the parents are lucky, she comes with them. If they're not lucky, she has just learned that anger is actually a pretty productive emotion and she tries it again, right? Yeah. Anger is actually a pretty productive emotion, and she tries it again, right? Yeah. Or you have parents who say, Jane, that's no way of responding.

Pack your stuff. Come with us immediately. And Jane learns that this is not very rewarding, that asserting yourself and saying what you want is not rewarding. Also, the way anger evolves is very different in that case. And a third set of parents saying, you should be appreciative of what we're doing. And look, all the parents on the beach, everybody, all the people on the beach, everybody's looking at us, how we raised you so poorly. people on the beach, everybody's looking at us, how we raised you so poorly. Now, you could say that Jane's anger turns into something that would be closer to embarrassment, but what you can see is that this interaction goes very differently. Now, what I think emotions are, are more the interactions between people than just one point in the narrative.

And I think usually when we think of emotions, we're sort of, well, the metaphors are doing really well in letting us think about an emotion as one thing in a point of time and always the same thing across different situations. So when I'm angry, anger is anger is anger. But is it anger? I mean, when I'm angry at politics, is that the same anger as when I'm angry at my child? Or is it the same anger as when I'm angry at my boss or my partner. And I would say, no, what anger really is, if anger is really anything, is a category of events that we store and that somehow we connect in our brain, that we have stories to rely on on and that when something happens, that at some point we say this was anger. We say it for other people, we say it of ourselves. And that's not meaningless.

I mean, calling it angry in our culture comes with certain responses, certain connotations of the word, is it good or bad? Is it good or bad in your position? Certain next actions, expected reactions of other people. But I think that when you think about emotions as these interactions between people, or at least the way an individual engages with their environment, you can also see that there are many ways in which that environment can respond or afford your emotion or deny you the emotion or punish you for it and so that you know that talking about universal emotions makes less sense yeah is language therefore in many ways problematic because you just describe a scenario where there's kind of three possible different sets of feelings and emotions but we're labeling them all with that term anger which in many cultures

certainly in the UK and I think in most western cultures anger is probably seen as a negative emotion I think by and large I guess a is probably seen as a negative emotion. I think by and large, I guess a sportsman who's getting angry to G them up, it might be seen as positive in that setting. But I don't know, language, does that become quite limiting for us? Because it makes us think that they are all the same thing when they clearly can have different meanings. I mean, language is deceiving if you think that it really is a reflection of the reality. But language is organizing. So in that way, you can say as long as you know that language makes the categories that we,

you know, it makes the categories that we, you know, it makes the categories. It doesn't reflect realities that are already there. You can say, well, what anger does is point out the commonalities between those very different interactions or very different situations. situations. It also, it gives you a repertoire from which you can derive, you know, the next steps or the next, it gives you even a repertoire of interpreting things, right? Anger gives you the repertoire of when you think people are angry, it gives you the repertoire of who has done something wrong to them who has wronged them for example what what were they entitled to or what kind of ideal did get violated by somebody else who is the other person so it gives you it gives you a lens to judge events through, a model to look, you know, a standard by which you perceive the world.

So I don't think language is only problematic. Language also affords ways of dealing with the reality. It organizes reality. Ways of dealing with the reality, it organizes reality. Language is only confusing when you think that anger is in fact, because we have one word, it's one thing. So that I think is the confusing part. Responding to your other part, anger is not a good feeling in the sense that you think the world is not a good place when you're angry, right? You're more deserving than what you're getting. But in a way, anger empowers because anger is, at least in Western cultures, but I think in other cultures too,

Western cultures, but I think in other cultures too. Anger situates you as a person who is, well, first of all, who is entitled to something, to a better treatment, and who can demand has a positive, an angry person is often evaluated as powerful. Yeah. I'm going to say something else. You can assume anger and people can deny it to you. So if you are angry and you take this emotion that potentially empowers you. And other people say, not for you. You don't have the position to make these claims. Then anger can backfire.

So, for example, we found in research that male CEOs get away with anger and, in fact, achieve quite a bit with anger. But that for female CEOs, it doesn't work the same way. This is so interesting. So with male CEOs, if they get angry, that emotion either to them or to the people around them, helps move things forward towards that male CEO's goal or desired outcomes. Yeah. But if a female expresses anger in the same way, it doesn't have that effect. It doesn't have that effect, at least according to the last studies we've done. But what's interesting about that, and I think this kind of speaks to the underlying premise of your work, that it's the culture and the cultures that affect our emotions.

I think a lot of women would say, yeah, you know, we can't act in a certain way because if we act in that way, it's perceived as different than if a guy acts like that. Yeah. So I think what's important is that what we call emotions are often claims about your position in the situation. So when I say Western anger, what I mean is that I claim I'm entitled and I tell you that I won't accept your behavior. Basically, I have to say I won't accept your behavior. But of course, your claim can be accepted by others and they can give you, they can yield to you, they can give you what you want. Or they can say, you claiming this, you have no basis of claiming this. And you can be seen as a person who's claiming things that they're not entitled to. And so emotions are in this way a constant negotiation of position. And of course, other parts of your positions play a role in there. So can you claim this position or are people going to challenge you?

claiming anger is a dangerous game because you claim a power position that people may not grant you. So how does your work then, or them hearing this part of our conversation, how does this apply, let's say, to this theoretical woman at the moment who apply, let's say, to this theoretical woman at the moment who has expressed anger in the past and it has not led to the desired outcome. She, let's say, is listening to this and going, okay, right, I get it now. I understand that. What can she now do based upon what she's learning? learning. Just taking a quick break to give a shout out to AG1, one of the sponsors of today's show. Now, if you're looking for something at this time of year to kickstart your health, I'd highly recommend that you consider AG1. AG1 has been in my own life for over five years now. It's a science-driven daily health drink with over 70 essential nutrients to support your overall health. It contains vitamin C and zinc, which helps support a healthy immune system, something that

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have less than men. I don't know if that's still true. So in many cases, you're learning history, and this is a learning history as a woman or as an African American in the United States. You're learning history is what you can and cannot have as emotions. So many women were sad or depressed or in many cultures, I would say in general, anger is a less claiming what you're entitled to. Entitlement is a Western concept. Individual entitlement is a Western concept. In many cultures, nobody claims entitlement. People are not going for individual needs or individual rights, but they're going for more for the benefits of the community, for communal life, for communal harmony. I mean, anger, but also other emotions, are interesting because they're always interacting with the kind of societal goals or expressed and reported by very powerful people who defend the social norms. So you're an elderly and you're indignant, let's say, that young people do not stick to the rules or are immoral.

immoral. So what you learn is to interpret situations in ways that mostly are consistent with what the culture affords. And it's a very complicated psychological process because you can see that individual women get backlash for having exactly that emotion that would move, that would, you know, that would lead to changes for men. And so what are the ways? I mean, the ways are, yeah, I mean, there's a whole field of research, of course, on how to achieve more equality for men and women. One of the ways is have collective emotions, not individual emotions. Collectively claiming a position that individuals can't claim by the regular emotional interactions. by the regular emotional interactions, politically claiming an emotion,

restructuring our world so that people get more used to women taking, women or minorities taking another position. I mean, there are other ways around it. But I think in the interpersonal negotiation that happens often through emotions, through individual emotions, the effect of emotion doesn't stand on its own. It's a step in the relationship that always gets interpreted against the background of what people's position is and what their rights are what these social expectations are um well let's just let's just really dive into this idea of where these emotions come from i really want to get this clear in my head so as i've already touched on we think that emotions are inside us.

Your book is called Between Us, so you're saying that emotions are actually between us more than they are potentially inside us. But is that the origin of where the emotion comes from? Is that what you're talking about? Because surely, no matter how you're raised, let's say something happens in your external environment, there's a change of some sort. So it's no longer neutral, it's no longer the status quo, something changes. That is then going to come from outside into me and create an experience. And because of that external situation, I'm now experiencing a certain emotion. First of all, do you agree with that? Secondly, where do we go wrong with our understanding of emotions? And maybe talk about it through that lens.

Yeah, I'm not denying that people feel things when they have emotions. But I wonder if the most important thing about emotions, I think, I wonder if the most important thing about emotions, I think, is that we interpret where we stand are somewhat out of the ordinary, out of the ordinary bad or out of the ordinary good. And so we need to figure out what to do to take advantage of the opportunities or to make sure that we're not harmed in whatever way. in whatever way. And so I think emotions are for doing. Now, we often have, I mean, we have a body, we feel things. And I'm sure that the body does things even in terms of getting ready for the next action.

I mean, you need to mobilize some resources to respond to events in the world that are out of the ordinary. So there is what it is exactly that we feel i i don't think you know what i don't think you always feel the emotion in the moment um i think of this but it's very a very not social example but almost causing an accident and And, you know, you don't feel anything. You move the steering wheel really abruptly. And then you start having these feelings of you feel your heart beating. And so it isn't always, I think many of our emotions are with a focus on the outside. I don't know that you need to say, oh, now I'm angry to feel anger, right? In retrospect, you can say this was really angry or you can experience an interaction with somebody else as really angry.

But I think psychology has made a caricature of what anger really is in the sense of anger is a face that is in one position and then you recognize it no i mean things are happening between people and you gradually um discover or unveil that this person is angry um and the same for yourself i think think. You are annoyed, you're working yourself up. And then what I would say is that in many cultures, and maybe even sometimes in our own, what we call emotions is not primarily defined by the feeling. So it's primarily defined by something happening in the outside. So it's primarily defined by something happening in the outside. You are a bastard who is not treating me well. Do I need to feel that I'm angry?

You know, I am, that may not, you are a kind person who is trying to understand what I'm saying. Do I need to feel that I'm grateful? I don't think it often works in that way. Yeah, I like this outside-in model. And certainly if I reflect on my own life over the past few years, over the past few years, one of the big changes that I feel has had an immeasurable impact on my happiness, my feelings of calm, my contentedness, has been this deep knowledge that I get to choose my response and my emotions in any given situation. So, for example, someone could cut you up on a road or a motorway, and that outside event could lead to anger.

You know, I can't believe they drove like that. They shouldn't be on the roads. Whatever narrative, whatever story you want to tell yourself about that. But certainly for myself, I've realized that I have the power of choice. Now, sometimes it's harder than other times, but I believe if you cultivate this skill, you work on it, you realize I don't need to generate the emotion of anger here. I can choose to look at the situation from their point of view or go, oh, I wonder what's going on in their life. They must be under a lot of stress today. Or maybe that guy's got a pregnant wife in the passenger seat and trying to get to the

hospital that I can't see. Or he was up last night because his kid was unwell or whatever it might have been and therefore you know the same external event is creating a different emotion inside me how does that fit through the lens of your model I think it's true that in the sense that I think it's true that in the sense that you, I don't know if you can always decide how to to be expressed and, you know, that everything out of the way, here comes my anger. So in that sense, and, you know, we know that that's true for anger, that's true for sadness. We can work on our emotions and of seeing other perspectives and work towards them. Of course, we can only do that to the extent that our perspective taking is free. And what I mean by that is that in some cultures,

And what I mean by that is that in some cultures, the consequence in some more tighter cultures, my colleague Michelle Gelfand would say, the consequences are more scripted. is an event, if somebody took advantage of you on the road and other people were there to see it, your honor may be at stake. And if other people see it, you cannot just deny your honor. That's a serious event in the environment. I mean, people will take you less seriously and you will lose honor unless you act in anger. Whether you need to feel that anger is completely different. So the choice of feeling, in principle, I think there is no biological big force. There is sometimes a cultural and a social force. And of course, in the same way, there's sometimes a force that you can try to escape, but there's sometimes a force of your own history, right? Yeah. That example you just used there, I found really interesting, this idea that if people saw it and you're in a culture where honor is really, really important,

well, yeah, your culture then is going to determine what emotion you feel. That's a really great example you just used. So in many ways, I think what you're saying is that the emotions we feel tend to be what our culture values? Yes, I think so. On the whole, more than not. I mean, it's not that we're all cultural robots and we do exactly what our culture values. But I do think that what is rewarding to feel and we talked about that what is socially rewarding to feel plays a role um and you i mean cultures change people can come together about what is important and not important this idea

that you can regulate your uh emotion your anger and still your road rage and still be a man is is emerging so it's you know you're you're contributing to a different look on those phenomena and so that happens it's not completely so emotions. I would say emotions can be constructed, but they're also socially constructed. And so it's very hard. And it comes back to the anger view, the anger story of women. Maybe it would be advantageous if women and minorities were sometimes angry for better reason than somebody cutting you off in traffic. But you are not by yourself to determine what is effective and what is not. So I think I'm responding to this choice issue.

If you have choice, yes, you can construct your emotions, but not everybody has choice in the same way or sometimes people need to work on their environment to to to free to free themselves up yeah um when you started studying emotions what was really interesting for me you you wrote how you were in the Netherlands. And I know you briefly touched on it already to a certain degree, but there was something about it where I think you ended up landing on the big five that were considered universal, you know, anger, sadness, happiness, love, and shame. And you said with hindsight, there were other emotions there that, you know, maybe some of the minority groups in the Netherlands were expressing that I don't know if you ignored them or they just didn't appear to be like real emotions to you. And if you were

doing it again, you would have gone back and taken them seriously. I find that really interesting. And I think you wrote that actually the way the question was worded was inherently problematic. I want to shortly get onto how I see that as a doctor when patients come in and we ask them certain things. But could you just speak about that? You know, when you were first doing the research, what were some of these emotions that came up from other groups that, you know, for whatever reason, you didn't decide to study at that time? Right. Well, what we found is that the Turkish, we said, list as many emotions as you can. And it was really a pilot study to choose the emotion words that we thought the synonyms for anger and happiness and what have you that were most commonly used. And many of our respondents, especially in the Turkish and the Surinamese group, listed what I consider behaviors like crying and laughing or yelling or fighting.

And then there was a group of emotions that was particularly common in the Turkish group, which was things as missing or longing for. So they were really different. They were kind of relational words. And, you know, my first response then, and I think, you know, reinforced by my advisors at the time was, well, those people don't know exactly what emotions are. So let's choose the most frequently used synonyms of that list that we had. And, you know, I learned a lot from that research, but it did mean that I didn't look at what they thought was the most common emotion word. So, and, you know, in retrospect, I think, what was my precise definition of emotion

that allowed me to discard what they had given me? And there wasn't any, really. It was just that those were not feelings. And so what I say in retrospect is that going by what they considered in emotions might have led me down this path much earlier, much faster to say, so why do they think that crying and laughing and screaming or yelling or helping was another one um are our emotions um and and why do they why do they mention them more frequently than the than the words that i would think were the real emotion i had no basis to to state that these were the real emotions because we'd think wouldn't we we, through the Western lens, certainly the lens which I've been taught at school here and living my life in the UK,

we'd call sadness the emotion, and crying, which is one of the things that you mentioned that some respondents said was their emotion, that you mentioned that that some respondents said was their emotion crying is almost it comes downstream like we first feel sad sad and then we cry so so we look at it differently don't we we don't see crying as the emotion we almost see that as a way that's a behavior it's a behavior yeah so but it has it has it has strong assumptions underlying that because it means you know the the force of nature is that comes from inside you is the sadness and then it's and then it looks for a way out and the way out is could be the crying And we also acknowledge that you can sometimes cry

because you're overwhelmed by something good. You can cry in happiness. But that's sort of the, that is not the essence of the behavior. And you could say it the other way around. I mean, crying is the behavior of being overwhelmed by whatever is in your environment, be it good or bad. And sometimes we infer from that a feeling of sadness. sadness. Yeah. Or we have been conditioned, perhaps, by our parents, by our family, by our schoolmates, by the world around us, that crying means there's something wrong. Right. And it's so

fascinating, isn't it, that what does come first? And I guess it depends. I was almost showing my cultural bias when I even asked the question, that you know, it's the sadness that comes first and then to get it out of us, you know, inside out, we need to cry. But you've just beautifully demonstrated how it could be the other way. Yeah. And maybe a good thing to say is that when you think, and this is something that Wittgenstein and my colleague, it's not original for me, my colleague Lisa Feldman Barrett say, but when kids learn to label their emotions, they learn it from adults, from their caregivers. And all their caregivers can see is the outside. So why does a caregiver say, you seem sad? Well, because the child is crying or moping or anything that they are not willing to do anything. So how children learn their emotions,

so to say, is not because the child has had some advanced course in psychology and can look right through the child, but because the parent knows what has happened and the parents judge the child's behavior and then infers that this is sad. And of course, the parent, the caregivers also point out that this character in the book or in the movie was sad, and they may call themselves sad at some point. So the child gets all these different instances of sad. But in first instance, what's visible to how the label comes to be paired with the feeling is through the behavior.

Because the parent or the caregiver doesn't have access to the child's internal yeah i mean this area is one of huge fascination for me i said right at the start that one of the things your book and the ideas within it has been doing for me is challenge my ideas of how i should parent, which I like. I think it's a good thing. I like to be challenged. I like thought-provoking ideas, which make me think and make me think, oh, maybe there's a different way. And that particular example, like if I play it out in my own life, on my own life, let's say, I don't know, my daughter is, let's say she's crying or she looks upset about something. Then, as you say, I don't know really what's going on inside her. I can just

see her outward expression. So I will then make probably a series of assumptions that, oh, I think that this has just happened. And because of that, her facial expression or action must mean that. So if I say that, it's potentially problematic because, you know, sure, maybe it's helping her have a way of describing how she's feeling. Maybe, but that assumes I've got everything right there. Or maybe I'm then conditioning her to think that when A, B, and C happens, that's the emotion you're feeling, whereas it may not be the emotion she's feeling. So it makes me think, well, you know, I'm probably being a bit harsh on myself. I don't think I do this too much. But it's more about asking her, well, how are you feeling? But again, right, there's a bias there, which I'm well aware of from reading your book, that it's a very western reductionist model that emotions start within us and have to be

expressed so you can probably tell from the question i'm i wouldn't say i'm confused i'm thinking about this a lot can you i don't know can you help me make sense of that example please it's a very good example but i think i i think I'm less negative about it than you are, because even though you may not know how she feels, you know what the situation means. And so what you're doing as a parent is to disambiguate what situations mean. Of course, what you're doing in helping them is giving them a cultural perspective. And that, on the one hand, is limiting because it's only one cultural perspective and there could have been many. On the other hand, it's going to help them being a member of their culture and being able to interact with other people and having relationships with other people. and being able to interact with other people and having relationships with other people. So I think you're right when you say that you're disambiguating something that you don't know if that was her impression.

In fact, I would say a parent's job is to help their children interpret the world. a parent's job is to help their children interpret the world. And I don't know how old your daughter is. At some point, she may contribute her own interpretation. She absolutely will contribute her own interpretation, for sure. Yeah, but that's after having been socialized in many different situations. So I don't think, you know, again, I think what you're fighting against is an idea that what she really feels is something deep inside her, natural, and that you're imposing something. What I would say you're doing is co-create or co-construct the emotion

with her. And, you know, of course, you can do that in a very bad way. And we know that not all ways are equal. But we also know that people who are socialized properly for their culture benefit. And so that being a culturally socialized person is a good thing and that parents help. And you have to. In a way, you can't take in the culture without any help of interpreting. And then you, as a parent, also have the help of a language, of a cultural repertoire, of cultural interpretations of what is the correct emotion under these circumstances. emotion under these circumstances um that idea of us needing to express the emotions inside of us is one that we kind of take for granted in western culture you know if you keep the anger inside you if you bottle it up it will cause problems and i think there's some pretty good research to support that. But you talk about certain cultures, when they feel anger, they don't express it, and they don't seem to have any of the negative impacts on their health. I found that very, very interesting. Yeah, I don't think it's so unlike you deciding that you can respond to somebody cutting you off in a culture that says you shouldn't feel angry, you should feel kind, you shouldn't feel sad, you should feel calm. I mean, all of those examples come from the literature. People can start from the expression and work back to their emotion largely.

and work back to their emotion largely. So even people who grieve and feel very upset can work backwards toward a state of calm if that is obviously required by the cultural environment. And it doesn't seem that when you want to work back to calm, that it's harmful necessarily. So this is a whole domain that I probably need to make several steps back. But I think when you're convinced that anger is the right thing to have, when you convince yourself and others are convinced that that is your authentic emotion, then what you may do when you can't express it may just be a different process than what you do when you think anger is not the right emotion to have in that situation. And you try to start looking from different perspective, or you try, as you say, you try to think about, you know, what state of mind would the other person be in?

What prompted their behavior? How important is this? And in fact, when we interviewed Japanese respondents, a lot of Japanese respondents many years ago about situations of offense. Those were exactly the kinds of meaning making that they did. They tried to say, what would motivate this other person to be like that? I tried to understand them, what would have motivated them to be offensive to me? What could I have done to avoid this? What is my role? How can I help them? And another way of doing it is a way that some meditation techniques use as

well, is seeing yourself as only one part of a big chain of events, like one small part in the world. So looking at yourself from the outside instead of as an agent, as somebody is important. So I think making meaning in a different way and trying to make meaning in a way that accommodates the situational requirements for the emotion at that point actually works. And that in many cultures, that is done because it's acknowledged that what should lead your emotions is the situation, the social norms, the behaviors, the norms for your particular role. the behaviors that the norms for your particular role um so what i want to say is that what this feeling of authenticity also has a feeling of of entitlement and reinforcement in it that subsequently makes it harder to suppress and then doesn't really suppress the feeling but suppresses the the behavior could you just clarify that last bit

again for me yes when you brought up authenticity yes it's a really important one so you can think of emotions as your real natural emotions and many people in and so emotions that come from the inside and that are, you know, that are the natural, what we talked about before. They're natural, they're yours, they need to be expressed or you need to do something with them. Many Westerners think of their emotions that way. We know that with that attitude on your feelings, it's very hard to then suppress those feelings because it feels like you're going against your nature, right? So when you ask people who have those views or live in a culture that way to suppress their emotions, they suppress their expression, but their feelings, if anything, get more intense. And they feel like they're betraying their authenticity,

their authentic emotions. And in fact, they are vulnerable to burnout and it has real consequences. When you think that way, when you feel strongly that way and you try to suppress it that's a lot of work and it and it takes a lot of why why it leads to burnout is a is a question that i don't think we fully know but one reason may be because you have these because it's it's a lot of work a lot of work to keep in in memory you have these feelings you have to work on something else. Now, it seems like people who don't view their feelings as so authentic, but who feel, who think that feelings should always be adjusted

to what the situation requires. always be adjusted to what the situation requires. For whatever reason, if you ask them to be kind in a service job, or if you ask them to suppress their anger, they, first of all, they don't get burnouts. They don't get... Second, they seem to be able to suppress not just the expression, but they seem to change the emotion itself. And so what they're doing is they work back from what the situation requires

to their feelings. And we don't know a lot about that process, but we know that people are trying to find just exactly the way you described trying to find meaning in the situation that allows them to have these different emotions yeah i love that super clear and um it's amazing just to think for a moment just how impactful culture is and i guess that this where I guess where I'm coming to with this next point is that we're now living in very multicultural societies, certainly compared to probably 100 years ago, but certainly 1,000, 5,000 years ago, when there's probably more homogenous groups of

people, you know, where people would have, I guess, similar values. That's been challenged for a lot of us all the time now, because, you know, with immigration around the world, you know, I'm from a family of Indian immigrants. So I want to talk about the immigrant experience at some point, because it's challenging for many immigrants. Certainly, I know many Indian immigrant families, like certainly people like me, born and brought up in the UK. Teenage years can be quite tricky. Now, they can be for everyone, for sure. But through my lens,

you're brought up by two Indian parents at home who've got, you know, Indian culture. And then at school, you've got Western culture. And of course, you're trying to fit in. So, you know, you try your best to fit in at school, you try your best to fit in at home, but there comes a point maybe when you're sort of 14 or 15 and you almost want to pretend that actually the home culture is not happening. You just want to be like your friends at school. And there's almost like an identity crisis at some point where, you know, you don't quite know who you are. And I now don't see that as a negative thing. I've come to realize that actually, what a gift to have been exposed

to two different cultures, to understand the machinery and the workings and the values of two different cultures. So I very much hope at this point in my life, in my 40s, that I've been able to kind of almost choose a little bit and go, oh, I love this part about Western culture. I love this part about Indian culture. And presumably the way that my wife and I parent is almost like a hybrid. It's not, you know, completely traditional Western. It's not traditional Indian. It's probably like a hybrid. It's not completely traditional Western, it's not traditional Indian, it's probably like a hybrid. Does that make sense to you in the context of all the research that you've done?

I have to say we know really little at this point about what happens in in the you know with the with people who are exposed to different cultures um what what we know it makes sense to me um so we don't have the research yet on it we don't have that much research on it specifically on emotions. What we know, we know a lot about averages and what people do on average. We don't know a lot of the different ways in which, I mean, how the average splits up. So it's possible that some people become hybrids. It's certainly also possible that some people choose between the two and live very segregated lives in communities of origin.

We know that some people turn away from their original communities. We don't really know at what costs that comes in which environment. at what costs that comes in which environment. So we have a lot of US research or North American research where we find that people who can engage in the two cultures are best off. We don't always find that in Europe. And part of the reason may be that Europe isn't as welcoming to two identities. Can I share an experience from last week, which made a speech to that?

And I don't know how relevant it is, but it certainly popped up in my mind as you were just saying that. So as we're having this conversation, the Football World Cup is going on, right? Huge interest all over the world, or the Soccer World Cup, depending on where you live, right? And I was in a coffee shop a couple of weeks ago in the morning, and a British chap, I say British because it's relevant to the story, popped in,

and we got chatting. You know, I'm a chatty guy. We were just chatting a little bit. He said, are you watching the World Cup? I said, yeah, I'm watching the World Cup. I'm not managing to watch as much as I would have 10, 15 years ago, but I'm watching what I can. He then said, who are you supporting? I said, okay, well, I sort of said England. I can't remember the exact ins and outs of it, but essentially he said to me, oh, I've got someone I know who always is negative about Iran. He's Iranian. He grew up there, but he had to leave and he lives and works in the UK. And he's always talking negatively about Iran to me. But when I asked him who he's supporting in the World Cup,

he said he's supporting Iran. And this guy was completely confused. And he said, it's ridiculous. You know, it's absolutely out of order. You know, he's here, he's working here. He should be supporting England. And the old Rangan of five or ten years ago would have just tried to get out of that conversation as quickly as possible. I don't want conflict,

I just want to enjoy my coffee. Hey, no worries, you crack on with your day, I crack on with my day. But for whatever reason, I decided to continue with him. And I said, okay, that's really interesting. You know, why is it that it bothers you so much? He goes, well, no, you know, he's coming here and he, you know, he should be really grateful to the UK and he should be supporting England. And I said, hey, well, you know, I understand, you know, I'm hearing you, I understand your perspective, but what if he doesn't need to show his affiliation to the UK or England through the lens of which football team he supports? Maybe, I think he had a business and said,

maybe he started a business here, he's employing people, he's contributing taxes here. He had to flee for whatever reason, He had to get out of Iran. Surely it's possible that he loves the UK and England and is happy to be here, but also maybe he's got some affiliation because all his ancestors were in Iran. It's a big moment that they're in the World Cup. He said, no, it's utterly ridiculous. He should absolutely be sporting England over Iran. it's utterly ridiculous. He should absolutely be sporting England over Iran. And I said, okay. And then I said, well, I said, listen, you know, coming from an immigrant family,

I'll tell you one thing I've noticed is that there's a bias, I feel. And again, this is not the sort of thing I normally talk about, but I think it's relevant here. And I really would love your perspective on this. I said, what I've noticed is that in the UK, not with everyone, but there is a feeling that people who come from different countries here, they need to integrate and they need to take on this kind of British identity. So what I've noticed when I've traveled, or let's say, go to France or Spain, where you see people who've emigrated from the UK, and you see this in Spain, pockets of English people who don't speak a word of Spanish. They are English pubs with English names serving English foods. I've got friends who live in the French Alps now who moved from the UK.

They live there for the mountains and they don't speak a word of French. And they go and drink in their English bars and they watch the English football. And again, I'm not criticizing. I'm just observing this. I said that to him and he goes, he said to me, well, listen, if I lived in Spain, I would literally be raving about Spain about their food about their culture I said okay let me paint a hypothetical scenario for you imagine in 12 years time imagine you've gone to Spain and you're living there for 12 years

and it's the final of the world cup and England are playing Spain who would you support and and his face just changed. He said, oh, definitely England. That's interesting. Definitely England. I said, hey, mate, yeah, but fair enough. And I said, can you just see how potentially for this guy, it's a similar thing, but he was a bit resistant, but I just found it. I mean, this literally happened in the last, I don't know, seven to 10 days. Yeah. And so I've been thinking about it a lot.

And when you just said it's different in Europe than in America, does any part of what I just said speak to that? Yeah, absolutely. I think, so in Europe, the majority people from Europe, if I may, for the occasion, includes the UK, think that adoption of the main culture has to go at the cost of the heritage culture. And that is not necessarily true. I mean, we know that in many ways you can be part of two cultures. You can be what you said, you can be Indian at home and English at school. And people can do that. And we do see in the domain of emotions, we do see that people have emotions more like the heritage

culture when they're at home and more like the mainstream culture when they're at work. So that's definitely a possibility. And the other thing is that my colleagues and i find that the more pressure there is to abandon your heritage culture the less willing people are or the less not willing that's not the right word but the less identify with the national culture and the reason is, I think, that as much as you try, you never become everybody has emotions and is who they are by virtue of all the experiences they have had in their lives. to forget about a part of your life is psychologically unrealistic. People can. People learn from experience. And if those experiences are in different cultures, they learn from different experiences. But it also tells you that your kind of people is not desired, is not part of the national

culture. And so by saying that, people are going to withdraw. So by saying that, people are going to withdraw. And so I do think that European cultures, psychologically speaking, would do better accommodating multiple cultures if they want national identification, because it's impossible to forget a part of your life that happens somewhere else.

Do you think America, because you've lived there for, is it 10 years you lived there for? Yeah, probably closer to 15 15 okay um i've visited america on many occasions but i've never lived there my perception from the outside at least is that because you know it's it's immigrants who've come into america and settled there and settled there and built businesses and built lives and followed the American dream or whatever it might be. Do you think there's more acceptance there of this kind of dualistic culture? I don't know. As I say that, there's an exercise physiologist I follow on Twitter who's Spanish,

but he lives and works in Colorado. And interestingly enough, he's been tweeting about the USA football games and the Spanish football games, and he wants them both to progress and do well. So, I mean, this is not a scientific study. This is just my observation that he obviously is, he's Spanish, so he wants Spain to do well, but he lives and works in America. He wants America to do well as well. America is a big country and there are differences across regions, but I think in general, Canadians are very outspoken about biculturalism. I think in America it's a little more accepted also than in Europe

that you can have those two identities. it's a little more accepted also than in Europe that you can have those two identities. And just for a fun story, my son and I both have Dutch citizenship and US citizenship. And last Saturday, they played against each other. And of course, so we looked, we looked at each other and said, we can't lose tonight. So that's another way of looking at it. But where was your son born? So that's another way of looking at it. Where was your son born? My son was born in Amsterdam, but then we moved pretty quickly after we moved to the US. So who did he support?

We literally didn't support. I mean, we literally said we can only win tonight. Well, I love that because it's like you don't have to pretend one of those doesn't exist. It's like I like them both. They're both part of who we are. So, you that's that's a nice way of looking at it um as a doctor right i think i think your work has i think it has relevance real practical relevance for society at large and understanding and harmony and potentially it's never been more important than than today i agree it really is i think very special and what it can do for people in terms of helping

them see the world differently i want to talk about education and teaching um but let's go to medicine right as a doctor and i'm drawn to this because if you know one of the things you you've mentioned before is that when you were designing questions to ask different groups what emotions they feel you're wondering well is there a problem with the question you know is it going to be understood in the way that you want it to be understood and i think of that when we're asking our patients about their symptoms. If you go to a Western medical school, you're taught how to ask questions, right? So let's say you're asking someone about their chest pain.

You will ask them, is it dull or is it sharp? Is it tightening? Is it tightening? We use these words to describe the pain that I think a lot of people just won't understand. They won't resonate with, but we can come up with diagnoses and conclusions based upon that. Or there's another scenario where certain cultures have certain ways of expressing certain symptoms. I know, for example, certain cultures don't have a word for depression, or they don't have a word for the menopause. So therefore, if you're brought up in a culture where you don't actually have a word for that thing, I don't know, it's really potentially confusing. And then I was just doing a bit of research into this in preparation for

our talk. And I came across this little bit online where they said, due to Asian traditions of viewing the body and mind as unitary rather than dualistic, Asian patients often tend to focus more on physical discomforts rather than emotional symptoms leading to an over-representation of somatic complaints. Now, I worked in a practice for a while where you would ask certain patients, you know, does it hurt here? Say, yeah. Does it hurt here? Yes. Does it hurt here? Yes. And people would say, look, I can't figure out what's going on. Like, you know, they're saying there's pain everywhere. There can't be pain everywhere. My perspective is maybe we're not asking the right questions

in the right way, or maybe that person's understanding based upon their culture is, I don't know, maybe if that particular person hasn't felt valued or validated at home, let's say, and they're in front of the doctor, they want to be taken seriously. So maybe they have got some emotional discomfort in their lives, but maybe you're not allowed to say that in that culture. Or maybe they've, with their experience, found that I have to say yes. I have to make sure the person knows I'm suffering. Do you know what I mean? I've got to, I think your work has implication for medicine as well. Yeah, absolutely.

I do think that, you know, doctors, a relationship between a doctor and a patient are often, in many cultures, that's an authority relationship. And it's possible that people say more yes, or that they're, you know, that they're more, that that's what they think you expect. But beyond that, I think that you say certain people don't have, or certain cultures don't have a word for depression. But again, for depression, you can wonder if it's a thing so what we call depression

is a list of symptoms and we um not to say that those symptoms don't are not correlated or are not related in any way but it's probably a lot of things we don't feel we feel lack of energy deregulation low affect have thoughts about about our value in the in the social world what um i have colleagues who describe the western conception of depression as a mentalizing conception so So what we emphasize in our depression is how you feel about yourself and the world or what your feelings are, blue, sad. I mean, there are these depression skills. And they say in many cultures, depression is being somatized.

Not saying that the original phenomenon is a mental phenomenon, but saying that in this cluster of symptoms, cultures can steer you or articulate more of one aspect of the phenomenon than of another. And that this is how it can appear to people. So they may not say they're depressed or they're devalued by their, they may honestly just feel pain everywhere and no motivation or no energy to do anything. That may just be the phenomenon that presents itself also for them. So I think what both in a a way it's similar to emotions. There are many things going on. The person has a position in relationships with other people.

Other people treat them in a certain way. They probably have some feelings also. But the point is what do you focus on and what is foregrounded in the symptoms? And I think that's, you know, what is the narrative that they bring and how can you empower that narrative and do something with it? That's going to be the question for medicine, I think. I mean, I find this really empowering like isn't that the skill of a healthcare professional can i be with this person and really try and pick up on what they're saying like a lot of we know a lot of communication is non-verbal yet a lot of time the way we try and

diagnose it there's a kind of document called the PHQ-9 in the UK, which is used, or certainly has been used, to diagnose depression, depending on what your score is. But the problem is, is that the questionnaire requires the person who's reading it to understand what do you mean by those questions. Otherwise, as you say, you could medicalize someone. You know, I don't know if you're familiar with Johan Hari or not. He's written a few books. He wrote a book a few years ago called Lost Connections. And the first time he came on the podcast, he shared a story in Cambodia. And I think this... There's work in Cambodia, yeah.

You've done work in Cambodia? No, no, I haven't I there's work in Cambodia yeah you've done work in Cambodia no no I haven't so there is work there is work yeah well what was interesting about this is that there was um I think there was a scientist or a researcher out there at the time looking at depression I think antidepressants were starting to be marketed in that country this is my recollection of a conversation from a while ago but But essentially there was a farmer in that country. He used to work in the wet rice fields. And I think there were landmines there. And one day he stepped on one, had a really bad accident. He had to have an artificial limb fitted, and then he would go back to work. And he was really struggling with his mood. He was stressed out.

He was in physical pain. And what his community figured out was that, oh, he can't, I think, contribute anymore because in the wet waterlogged rice fields, it's very uncomfortable with an artificial leg. And they thought, well, if he became a dairy farmer, he wouldn't need to get it wet. So they bought him a cow. And by buying him a cow, his symptoms went away. He started to feel better. And I think they said something like, it was the cow. The cow was our antidepressant or our anti-analgesic. And I found that so interesting. And I think I was thinking about that when I was reading your book

because it's the same underlying concept, isn't it? Yeah, it is. Yeah, it very much is. I have a few responses. I don't know if they're very coherent. But one is that you can talk about feelings sometimes without talking about feelings. So you can talk about a person's position in the world without saying how depressed are you. And that may give you more information.

And that may give you more information. How is it different, your life now, from before when you still had your leg? What is hard for you? Do you think it will improve? I mean, one part of depression is not improving. improving so that was one thought is that you know this idea that everybody has to say how sad and blue and hopeless they are is maybe not the way to get at people but you can still evaluate their their state yeah the other is that one one reason that people do not use mental concepts sometimes is because they relate to their place in the social world. And so feeling depressed also could be read as an accusation, like it's not good enough here. And so in a way it has, so I think it's a combination of what people are used to do, but also what is appropriate in the culture to focus on, given that you don't have a word for sad, but they were just tired.

And in a way, it means that you don't have to complain about your circumstance. It's something of the body. Nobody has to feel obliged of anybody. So that was another thought that I have, that a lot of the language we have has social implications, and sometimes people do not want to implicate others yeah and the third thought i had was um that the amnesia is often with people with individual patients and that in many cultures people don't do one-to-one conversations. People don't make decisions one-on-one. And it may be better to include other people. And that's going to be to include their family or to include. And that's, of course, a precarious one because sometimes it's the position in the family that's not going well.

It's the position in the family that's not going well. But on the other hand, it's a very unnatural situation in many cultures to sit in front of an authority person who questions you about symptoms. Yeah. these things into account as as doctors as health care professionals when we're sitting across the table from someone and trying to elicit their story and trying to understand it of course to be a good clinician we have to get good at this you know whether we want the world to have changed as it is or not it is changing and people are moving. That's just the way it is. So if you're going to be good at your job and help people, you've kind of got to understand this, don't you? Do you feel, you know, what you just said there about,

for some cultures, it's unnatural to sit one-on-one with someone to try and make a decision like things are done together collectively do you feel that this is a gross overgeneralization but i'm gonna go with it anyway do you feel that um a lot of Western cultures that have emphasized the needs and desires of the individual, let's say America being the kind of one extreme there, you know, the American dream, I can do this, I don't need anyone. If I work hard and I push through, I can achieve anything I want, right? It's about me and what I can do. through, I can achieve anything I want, right? It's about me and what I can do. That sort of individual, that kind of individualistic culture, do they have a certain view of feelings and emotions compared to more group-orientated cultures where people do things

together? It's about, as you were mentioning mentioning before it's about not what i'm feeling but what should i feel in the context of this situation yeah i think so i was interviewed by by somebody for for a podcast who was um her parents were chinese and she said, we talked about the experiment where people look at a face and then the surrounding face with what we would traditionally call an emotional expression. And then people around this one person also have expressions. And so Japanese in this experiment inferred it from all the faces and Americans inferred it from just that face. So how does John feel? Well, look at John's face or look at all the faces in the room. And she said to me, the Chinese interviewer, she said, this makes me feel so much better because I always felt non-agentic that I had to look at others to know what I felt about certain choices or things.

And she said, this is empowering to me because it just means that I don't, maybe it's just, you know, the way we ask the question, how do I feel? How does everybody in the room feel? Has something to do with each other. And I won't say that John's face wasn't important for how people thought they felt, he felt, but the other faces were also important. So I think, yeah, looking at others to make decisions, looking at others for what the feeling should be, isn't so uncommon. And maybe it's not so uncommon. Maybe we do more of it than we want to acknowledge. But I mean, it's not. I think modern medicine also includes the partner now

for important decisions, right? So it's just a matter of degree in some ways. But I think focusing on internal feelings and then talking to the person who is supposed to have them is a very Western paradigm, where you look inside and you see what's really there. That seems to me, I mean, my work doesn't go much outside the realm of emotions. But in general, that seems to me a very Western way of mapping experiences. And you can say that experiences can be mapped also in terms of what is happening in the world and what is happening between people.

And in some ways that works for us too. I can ask you how you feel and you can say i'm depressed i can also say how your relationships have been going and you can say i've you know i i haven't i haven't felt that things were so fun or good or i felt like i didn't fit in or I haven't been able to do the work I wanted to. I mean, it's possible to describe the world in a meaningful fashion. I mean, in a fashion that is meaningful to the individual and their environment without focusing on internal mental feelings. And that may sometimes be a better way of communicating to people from other cultures. I was talking to somebody who works in Algeria with traumatized men, and he was telling me that the psychotherapeutic language for trauma

is really hard in that honor culture so now you have to say that you're that you felt weak and powerless and that things that you don't feel like you're nervous and that you don't feel like you can handle life and how does this mesh with masculinity and being a right person in the world. But of course, there again, I think you can talk about how things were before the event, how things are now, what things have become harder, what they wish they were able to do if they felt better, rather than focusing on the weak feelings of not being able to sleep or focus so there are many ways in which you can address experiences without using this mental

yeah i i love that and i think i think this nuance that your work gives us and emphasizes is so important. Just take that last example. There's a big movement now to being more vulnerable, right? Particularly for men, show your vulnerability. It's important. And I don't disagree with that, first of all. I think it is a good thing. But often there's only one narrative, right? So being vulnerable means that you have to express weakness and do this and do that. And what you beautifully articulated there is that you can be vulnerable in a different way. And I think this has far-reaching implications because often we, particularly these days, let's say on social media, we see a particular influencer saying something or doing something

a particular way. We might feel, oh, that's the way I should be doing it. But it's like, well, maybe or maybe not. Maybe that way works for that person in the context of their upbringing and their culture but maybe I can take that concept to go no I need to tweak that because that won't work for me and my mates and my family does that make sense yeah absolutely absolutely that makes sense and it's it's a language that fits in a larger social context or not. And how does it fit also in the, I mean, being vulnerable fits nicely in this emancipated new world where men and women are equal. But you can't just transport that to Algeria. So I feel that we're way too self-assured about our language.

You know, as professionals, as health professionals and mental health professionals, we're way too self-assured that our language, the language we use in our private lives, is the language that works in different cultures and also describes the decontextualized reality. There is no decontextualized reality. Yeah. I mean, one thing that springs to mind for me is, and maybe we can talk a little bit about how, you know, how different cultures might raise their kids. You know, I know shame, for example, is something that we don't think is a good thing in Western culture, but it's something that is used in Asian families or certainly Chinese families you've written about, which I find interesting. Before we get to that, I just want to share with you that like Indian families, and when I say Indian families, I don't mean every single Indian

family. They're not homogenous groups, but everyone acts the same. But it's not uncommon that people will say, like people like my parents can be quite direct. Like if I'd been away to university for a few months and medical school and, you know, been enjoying the good life for a bit and you come back for Christmas holidays, mom would say, what have you been doing? You look fat. You look awful. So it's really interesting. I think this really speaks to your work. Words have been said, right, by an individual. How we interpret those words will depend on our culture. Absolutely.

I know my mum means nothing by that apart from love. It's like she loves her son. It's like, what are you doing to your body? What are you doing? Whereas if that was said to somebody else, that's, I don't know, one of my friends, for example, or whatever. I'm not saying mum's done that, but it would be interpreted as rude. Yeah, it was literally what an American woman talked about, that her grandmother told her that she shouldn't eat that much because she was fat. And it was horrendously shameful, but in a bad way.

But I think that the big difference is what consequences, what is the meaning of that in the relationship? So does it mean rejection or does it mean sharing responsibility for your welfare? And I'm assuming that your mom just meant, you know, we're all responsible. You're obviously ours, and we need to make sure that you're doing well. I know of India and other Asian cultures to talk about gross generalizations is that it's only done in the very close family where we are really together. She wouldn't go up to her neighbor and say, you look fat. Yeah, true. She wouldn't. Or if I had a friend come. Yeah, she wouldn't say that either. She wouldn't say, oh, you're looking really fat. Yeah. I mean, but she would to me or my brother. Yeah, yeah.

Or something equivalent like that. Yeah. And I mean, the way I understand it, it's part of trying to improve. Yeah. You know, as a family, you try to improve and you help each other try to improve on your, you know, you're self-critical, you're critical of your very close others, so that we can work on it, so that we can improve. And that's what you've written about how many of certain cultures don't praise their kids.

don't praise their kids. Now, this is really interesting because I think that applies to me. You don't really get praise. Your deficiencies are pointed out regularly. And again, if you take a step back and go, well, what is the value of this culture? Let's say for me, and I think you were writing about Chinese mothers in the book with respect to this, or certainly East Asian families. That's just where a lot of the work has been done. You say a lot of families will not praise their kids. They'll point out deficiencies.

And that actually serves a role. If the role is, like in a family like mine, educational excellence is the highest value. So they don't see the need to tell you what's going well. So no, you're not very good at this, but you're not very good at that. You're failing at that. no this is you're not very good at this but you're not very good at that you're failing at that because that's then a um a motivation for you right to to change something but if you then try and bring that into something else let's say when you get married for example you may feel you may

find very quickly that someone's got a completely different culturalrints and yeah i found it interesting you kind of go there's no it's not right or wrong it's just different yeah i i think yeah i mean and and in fact um getting criticism is in many cultures demotivating right it's it's interesting that when there is quite a bit of research that when American students get criticism that they choose another topic, something that they feel good at. And it probably, it has to do with the relationship with, does it imply rejection? Does it imply rejection? But it probably also has something to do with what you take the criticism to stand for or the failure to stand for. If you take it as just one point of improvement that I need to work on, then it's something to turn your mind and attention to. If you take it as a reflection of how good you are or how talented then it's demotivating and and carol dweck psychologist calls this an antithetive

what does she call it mind i think in an incremental mind anyway it's you know can you do you think of yourself as something to be worked on, a project in progress, so to say? And, you know, and so negative feedback helps you to focus on what needs to be done next. Or do you take it as I'm no good? And there are large cultural differences on that too. And it may have something to do, I don't know that there's research about that, is what is the base of rejection? If you are certain that some relationship will stay no matter what, I mean, your parents are going to be there

for you. It's a very different idea than I will be evaluated for how good a person I am and whether I will be loved or not depends on my qualities as a person. your love is dependent on what your qualities as a person are, then somebody pointing out that this is not so good is devastating because that means that the next step is that they might not love you anymore. If we all experience the world so differently, what does this all mean for empathy? what does this all mean for empathy yes so empathy is a word that has been used in many different ways and sometimes empathy means trying to see what your position is and sometimes empathy is used used in the way of trying to feel what you feel.

I think empathy in the way of trying to feel what you feel is not enough. I mean, I don't think you can, I don't think we should try to project our feelings on what we would feel. I mean, if I were you and my mother said I was fat, I would feel devastated. I would feel like a failure. But that's not what you're going to project on me. So I think that kind of empathy, looking at somebody, trying to imagine really well what you would feel in that situation, and then paying attention to that, that kind of empathy I think is not going to work. Another kind of empathy I think is going to work, and I think throughout the conversation we have been trying that, is trying to see what it means for people. So what is at stake for people?

What is their narrative about what is happening? Do they think what is happening to them is good or bad? Do they expect good or bad consequences? What do they expect from other people? How do they describe it themselves? Is that a loaded term or is that a positive, affective term? I mean, those kind of things we can try to. And what I say in the book is you can try to, you will never, I will never feel what you feel when somebody criticizes me.

But I may approximate that feeling when I understand all the conditions. And that's what we should be trying to do. We should try to be humble about what we know about other people and try to pick up on their narrative and conditions and their meaning making what other people in their environment think um so it's going to be a it's there's no i don't think there's a shortcut but i do think you can get better at it yeah i think in an interview i heard with you you said you prefer resonating to empathy i think resonating is a better word what do you mean by that when you say that what do you mean by that resonating is um not feeling what you feel but sort of understanding what you feel given what I know about your values, your environments, what you're trying to do, what it means for you if your mom says those things, that's resonating. So resonating is not

having the same feeling, but still understanding the feeling given that I were you. I mean, I had this friend who was, I taught Dutch for a while to an illiterate Moroccan woman in the Netherlands. And she and I became really good friends in some way. But of course, I was not going to tell her what I would do in her situation. Her husband was sometimes difficult, and then he wouldn't let her go out and wouldn't let her meet with strangers. And then she basically would soften him until she could go out again. And it was always when her husband thought that, I think his honor was at stake.

I would say now it's been over 30 years ago. But I could understand her. I really liked her. And I really could understand her, the intricacies of her life and how she navigated it. Even though I was my most feminist self at that point, you know, I didn't think I,

nobody should tell me anything. I wasn't, I wasn't, I, at that point I thought I was never going to get married. I wasn't going to submit myself to the patriarchy. But it's possible to resonate given that a person is in those circumstances and that certain things are important for them. For example, that their husband feels valued and feels like they're a good wife to their husbands. valued and feels like they're a good wife to their husbands yeah um so i think that's the kind of resonating that that's the kind of relationship that i mean by resonating yeah i like that because

i for me as i hear you share that experience, it really highlights a key idea that I think about a lot, which is as we understand other people better, we understand ourselves better. Even though we may not have the same lives and the same triggers and the same cultural values as somebody else, it's really exciting to explore it and understand it and often when we understand someone else and their family dynamics and and all the things that are going on there we we kind of reflect on our own lives i think so and i think it lays bare how cultured our own emotions are, right? The anger about my husband being five minutes late for dinner, I describe that as an imaginary story.

But really comparing it to women who are accepting anything lays bare that I think I'm entitled to a certain respect that I don't think it is without. It's obvious that I do the cooking and that he comes whenever he pleases. I mean, a lot of those things, it speaks to an entitlement that I feel speaks to relationship expectations. So I think it tells you something about yourself when you try to understand what the intricacies are of other people's emotional lives i've i've really come to see empathy more now like less that i know what you're feeling but i think this is how i wrote about in my last

book was practice true empathy which is not i know how you feel but i don't know how you feel but i'm still here for you right yeah i don't know how you feel, but I'm still here for you. Right. Yeah. I don't know what you feel. It's called in the intercultural psychiatry, it's called cultural humility or not knowing. Yeah. And I think it's, I mean, it's not just cultural humility. You can have it towards anybody in a different position, in a different body than you, basically. But I think in a different, culturally, it's even more important because the starting points are so different. Yeah. So apart from not taking offense when someone says thank you to you for cooking them dinner,

what else has changed or shifted in your life since you started researching emotions and the impact culture plays on emotions? And after writing this book, any other changes that you're able to share? I think a lot of changes. When I grew up in a Jewish, not Orthodox family, but there was pretty observance, not very religious, but very much. And I wanted out. I wanted to do what I felt like doing. I didn't want to be forced in anything. And I've just come to recognize that as one way of being. A way of being that can also hurt other people, that sacrifices stable relationships for excitement and new opportunities and new relationships,

but also creates vulnerabilities. So I think what happened to me, and I don't know which part of it is aging, but it's very much that I think it's one way of having a good life. The way I try to do my life is one way of having a good life, but there are many others, and they all have costs. And I think that about Western individualism in general. I think if you're doing well as an individual, it gives you a lot of liberty. But it also makes people much more vulnerable because if they don't do well individually, there's not a network that takes care of them as much.

We don't take care of the elderly. You know, we don't take care of our depressed as much. We don't take care of the elderly. We don't take care of our depressed as well. One of the things that we know is that first-time occurrence of depression is no different across cultures. But second-time depression is actually more common in Western cultures. And I can only imagine that is because if you are depressed, your collective makes sure that there still is a scaffolding, which is if you are depressed in individualist cultures, the scaffolding is gone. I think there are costs to every way of doing emotions and doing lives. And I'm much more, I guess, I'm much more of a, I mean, not in the extreme. I don't think people should kill other people. relationships, I see many more shades of doing them that are still really fine, that can lead to meaningful and productive lives.

Yeah. I think this is one of the beautiful things that travel gives us, doesn't it? When we go to a different country and immerse ourselves in a completely different culture, you realize, oh, wow, people live in harmony in very different ways. They have different ways of doing things, different values, different customs. But when you see it in the context of their culture, it all kind of makes sense, which is, I think, one of the great gifts of travel for those people lucky enough to be able to travel and kind of experience those things. But it's been such a joy talking to you.

I think you can see from my questions or observations, I should say, half the time, I'm really fascinated by this entire topic. I think you've done such a brilliant job at putting it all together in between us. I really do. I think it's uh it's a book that can really help shift people's perspectives for the better um just to finish off

we're living in a world at the moment where there appears to be a lot of division, a lot of intolerance, a lot of judgment about the way other peoples are living their lives. For me, I don't think it's very helpful. I don't think judging others, looking down on others, wishing things were other than the way that they often are, I don't think it's that helpful a lot of the time for our own personal wellbeing. To finish up this conversation there with a bit of hope, what would you say to people who say, you know, what would you say to people who are worried and who look around them and say, you know, there's so much disharmony, like people

aren't getting on what are we going to do do you have any kind of final words of hope yeah i think i you know it's hard i i don't think first of, that harmony is going to come from diminishing other groups. So I think it's important to talk about your own needs and what you would like in the world without looking immediately at how other groups would interfere with that. I mean, I think you can only hope to find harmony if everybody's needs are looked at, maybe not fully taken care of, but if we can see how they're compatible. So I, you know, I'm talking to myself as much as to many other people. I think we are very judgmental in this time and day about how people, how different groups are. And I would

say that, you know, it's the hardest for me to be compassionate with conservative values. And yet, I think there is something to be learned from looking at what is at stake there. You know, what do conservative people fear? What is, can we somehow safeguard what is important for them without denying other people, you know, the similar rights? So is that hopeful? I don't know. We're far from that. But I think in the communication, I think we should look at what we're able to do rather than what we're not able to do.

we're able to do rather than what we're not able to do. And one of the things that has made me hopeful and not so hopeful is how many countries were able to accommodate, I don't know how many Ukrainians coming in. I think, you know, that if we're able to accommodate so many people, we should be able to do that for other people as well right we should be we should be able to take other people's perspective as well because that's really what we've done uh for ukraine um and look at what the needs are there but that's i you know i don't know that i i i can't look into the future as well as you have hope i sometimes i try hope it's a moral obligation we we try i think you need to try to have hope and work on what people can do and what people can do is trying to really resonate with other people and see what they can

do from that perspective actually i think you're doing work. I think it's going to help people be less judgmental, more inclusive. Thanks for coming on the show. Thank you so much. This was a wonderful conversation. Really hope you enjoyed that conversation. As always, do think about one thing that you can take away and start applying into your own life. Now, before you go, just wanted to let you know about Friday Five. It's my free weekly email containing five simple ideas to improve your health and happiness. In that email, I share exclusive insights that I do not share anywhere else, including health advice, how to manage your time better, interesting articles or videos that I've been consuming,

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