Culture, Emotions and the Relationships Between: In Conversation with Batja Mesquita

Batja Mesquita, social psychologist,  affective scientist, and pioneer of cultural psychology joins us to talk about her wonderful book Between Us: How Cultures Create Emotions (2022).

In this episodes, we dive deep into the key ideas within the book and discuss the interplay with systemic ideas. Batja invites us to reconsider emotions as universal responses and takes an outside/in perspective on how emotions are created through culture. We discuss how this can be vital to understanding and navigating cultural differences in emotions. She skilfully presents how acknowledging these differences in emotions allows us ti find common ground, humanising and humbling us for the better.


About Batja:

Batja Mesquita is a social psychologist, an affective scientist, and a pioneer of cultural psychology. She is a professor of psychology at the University of Leuven, Belgium, and director of the Center for Social and Cultural Psychology at the University of Leuven. Before coming to Leuven, she was affiliated to Wake Forest University, the University of Michigan, Stanford University, and the University of Amsterdam. Mesquita is one of the world’s leading authorities on the psychological study of cultural differences in emotions. Her most recent research focuses on the role of emotions in multicultural societies. She studies how emotions affect the belonging of minoritized youth in middle schools, and the social and economic integration of “newcomers” (i.e. newly arrived immigrants). Mesquita has been a consultant for UNICEF and the WHO, and most recently, she was a member of the core group of scientific advisors for the Happiness and Well-being (SEH) Project, and initiative of the Vatican in partnership with the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network (SDSN).

Link to website:

https://www.batjamesquita.com/


Reference:

Mesquita, B. (2022). Between us: How cultures create emotions. WW Norton & Company.