Meta-emotions about anger and amae: A cross-cultural comparison

Foundationalists and culturalists are at odds about whether emotions are biological and innate or whether culture is crucial to creating and developing particular human emotions (or whether all cultures even have emotions in the English sense of the word). From the foundationalists' point of view, the best case for innate emotions are the basic emotions such as anger and joy that are observed through facial expressions universally around the world, with homologies even in some other mammals. On the other hand, the culture-specific emotions (such as the Japanese amae) that apparently have no one-word equivalent in any other culture are the best case for the cultur-alists' point of view. In addition, personal theories of emotions - how people interpret their own emotional experiences - are called meta-emotions (Gottman, 1995). Meta-emotions greatly influence how we interpret and deal with our own and others' emotions. We suggest that ultimately it is in the symbiosis of biological capacity and cultural interpretation that persons consciously orient their lives, as guided by felt emotions.