日々精進

读《Between Us》

读书笔记

核心观点总结

情感的文化建构性

核心概念对比

「我的」情感 vs 「我们的」情感

美式情感模式（MINE emotions）

东亚情感模式（OURS emotions）

具体文化情感案例

日本文化中的典型情感

中国农村社区

情感的语言学维度

跨语言情感词汇差异

翻译的局限性

文化适应与情感学习

双文化个体的优势

情感学习的可能性

实用启示

跨文化理解原则

  1. 避免假设：不要认为不按期望方式行为的人在压抑"真实"情感
  2. 主动询问：直接了解而非猜测
  3. 理解目标：关注人际关系目标而非表面行为
  4. 保持谦逊：承认每个人都有不同的经历和目标

共情的局限性

关键洞察

情感的关系性质

「情感事件是在我们之间完成的」

跨文化探索的方法

本人单薄的思考

摘抄

0805

I believed that, deep down, all people would turn out to have emotions just like mine. I no longer do.

Any community that provides a set of experiences, understandings of the world, relationship practices, moral sensitivities, and values and goals may shape the emotions we have as individuals. Different cohorts, different socioeconomic groups, different religions, different gender cultures, and even different family cultures may provide emotions with their meaning.

When people come to the conclusion that others have feelings just like them, that conclusion may stem from their own projections.

The assumption that emotions are universal often hides an underlying idealism.

It is possible to find humanity, even in the absence of universal feelings.

Emotions—our own included—are as dependent on our culture as our clothes, our language, and the foods we feed our children.

0806

OURS emotions — emotions as relational acts between people.

Emotions were closer to relational acts than to mental states.

The members of a rural Chinese community affirmed their caring relationships by working. Work, and the suffering that is intrinsic to hard work, both symbolize love and affirm the relationship with another person.

American caregiving practices facilitate looking inward to the MINE emotions, and Chinese lead the attention outwards towards OURS emotions.

Social sharing helps to focus the emotion either inwards to MINE aspects of emotions, or outwards to OURS.

In many cultures, people consider their emotions to be “negotiated” with the social environment, rather than leading a separate life inside them.

Emotions are social practices, shared to a large extent with other people.

0807

Emotions help us become part of our culture.

Shame highlights your proper place in an unalienable social network, rather than focusing on rejection or isolation. It reminds you how to behave in the network, but it does not push you out.

Omoiyari “refers to the ability and willingness to feel what others are feeling, to vicariously experience the pleasure and pain that they are undergoing, and to help them satisfy their wishes.” The emotion is at the very center of the harmonious relatedness that is culturally valued in Japan.

Perspective taking makes a person ponder about how they can improve to better meet others’ expectations, and to persevere and overcome externally encountered adversities.

The idea that omoiyari has to be cultivated, but cannot be forced onto kids until they are ready, prevails in Japanese preschool practices. Teachers show great restraint, even if the interactions between preschoolers are conflictual, and at times aggressive.

When the (white middle-class) American goal may be to raise a child who is secure enough to become independent, the Japanese goal is to raise a child who becomes sensitive enough to take perspective. If pride and happiness are foregrounded in many American and European contexts, then amae and omoiyari are socializing emotions in Japan.

Outside-in emotions are cultivated to first meet the needs of the environment, including relationships with others. Inside-out emotions follow the feelings out.

We experience such emotions as pride, shame, fear, love, amae, omoiyari, calm, and excitement because they are instilled in us by our parents and other cultural agents. Rather than emerging from someplace deep within us, these emotions have been conditioned by recurrent experiences within our cultures.

Emotions remain OURS into adulthood. The fabric of our emotions is woven by interactions with others. These interactions account for how we feel and act.

0814

In Buddhist psychology anger (that I do not get what I want) is a poison in human nature—as despicable as the illusion that I am entitled to get what I want and that the world ought to give it to me (from which anger springs).

When circumstances frustrate the ideal, U.S. Americans find blame and unfairness, whereas Japanese are more reflective of their own shortcomings, and try to overcome difficulties. Anger as nonacceptance is woven into a general view on life.

Humiliated fury appears to skip the painful experience of rejection and transforms it into aggression towards others. One way of understanding the benefits of humiliated fury is that ashamed individuals draw on anger as a resource to overcome the painful and paralyzing experience of shame, and to regain agency and control, though sometimes at a great cost to themselves and others.

Emotions are prevalent when they are right and rare when they are wrong.

0818

Loved ones are special to us, and we are special to them—so special, in fact, that we spend lots of time with them and share special moments. We feel love when the relationship is secure and trusting, and when we enjoy open communication. Love means giving attention to your loved one.

Love, especially the reciprocal kind, gives you self-confidence and makes you positive about life; having love makes you more secure and relaxed.

Implicit in love is that the loved one’s unique qualities invite a connection.

Amae is based on need and indulgence, rather than idealization or elevation of the partner.

In Asian American contexts, people do not seek active affirmation from others, but they still find it good to know that they are part of a group when the going gets tough.

Three pillars of contemporary American life: success, being in control, and choice. Happiness is so interwoven with the pillars of the American Dream—success, control, and choice—that it is a “right” emotion.

Energetic, active, and bouncy happiness serves you particularly well when you want to make things go your way.

Depression among Hong Kong Chinese meant not being calm enough, whereas among white Americans it meant a lack of excitement. Ill-being was related to lacking the happiness that is culturally valued.

When calm is culturally valued, people prefer others who seem to have “calm feelings.” (the 情绪稳定)

We should move away from a model of culture as something outside ourselves that imposes norms on the natural emotions that we have. Instead, we should recognize how we constantly enact culture in our everyday interactions, and how these interactions scaffold our emotional lives.

The emotions that contribute to flourishing differ by culture (and by position), depending on the relationships goals. And even if some form of love and some form of happiness are part of flourishing in some or most cultures, the modal types of love and happiness run very different courses. It may be better to speak of loves and happinesses in plural rather than love and happiness in singular.

0820

Emotion vocabularies in some languages—such as Chewong in Malaysia—count as few as seven emotion words, and other languages count in the thousands, with English containing more than two thousand emotion words. There is no question, therefore, that languages organize the domain very differently, and make both different kinds as well as different numbers of distinctions.

Not all languages have words for emotion concepts The only term that came close to 100 percent was good (feeling good): almost all languages had a distinct word for it. The percentage of languages having a distinct word corresponding to the other English words was much lower: bad (as in feeling bad) occurred in 70 percent of the languages, love in less than one-third, happy and fear in about 20 percent, and anger and proud in less than 15 percent of the languages.

if you learned a new language, especially a language from a different family than English (an Indo-European language), you would have much more trouble understanding the new emotion terms than you would have, say, understanding the color terms of that language.

Some languages use the same word for pink and red, and some languages that fail to make the distinction between green and blue.

You cannot assume you understand an emotion from another culture, just because there is a translation of the English emotion word. And if you did, you would risk projecting the English-language version of the emotion, rather than understanding the local emotion category represented by the word.

The ways in which languages conceptualize emotions is different.

The category of emotion itself is differently understood across cultures, but moreover, emotion lexicons from different languages do not neatly map.

What an emotion concept comes to mean is largely dependent on common encounters within the culture, or on the encounters that receive attention.

The way you make sense of your feelings depends on the emotion concepts that are available in your culture; these concepts are shared within your social community.

There is good reason to assume that without a concept, there is no emotion as we know it.

“Right” emotions are episodes with desired endings, “wrong” emotions are stories with endings that you would like to avoid.

Finally, psychologist Lisa Feldman Barrett and her team have clearly shown that without a word available, it is also harder to perceive emotions in the face. Emotion lexicons organize our experiences; it is a fair hypothesis that culturally different lexicons constitute your emotional experience differently.

Emotion concepts are sets of cultural episodes that we have experienced, directly or by observation, supplemented with the cultural lore of an emotion category. And to the extent that people’s emotion lexicons and experiences differ across cultures, so will the emotional experiences that they distinguish. This is not a radically constructionist view: cultures cannot invent people’s emotions from the ground up. This is because all our emotions are situated within relationships between people, who themselves are confined by the bodies that make them up. Human relationships and human bodies have a lot in common across cultures, but they also allow for much variation.

If emotions do not refer to mental states, but rather to stories in the world, then our emotions differ because the worlds in which we live differ. That we can talk about emotions across cultures is owing to the fact that some things are stable: people in all cultures have emotions about other people they care about, challenges of their social position, the success of their group, and about what they consider to be good, beautiful, and moral.

0822

Doing emotions in a different culture can be learned but, for most people, it will take more than a lifetime. This may also be true when it comes to emotion perception.

Even a relatively brief exposure to another culture affects the way we do emotions.

Biculturals, in other words, may provide a clear model for the OUtside-in nature of emotions that holds for all of us: our emotions are attuned to specific situations whether defined by culture, gender, type of relationship, or something else.

Practice makes better, and this is not merely the case for immigrants. It is possible for anybody to learn and become attuned to other contexts.

0825

We cannot understand the emotions of others unless we try to adopt their frame of reference. We can only understand their emotions when we understand them as OURS—following them OUtside, rather than INside.

Understanding the emotions of others is not merely a matter of intellectual curiosity. Emotions make you part of your group or culture, and unfortunately, the opposite can be true, too.

Mere empathy does not work, because it does not overcome the cultural gap.

No two people have experienced the very same episodes in their lives, and even if we speak the same language and share the same emotional concepts, our unique experiences may have colored those concepts differently.

Do not assume that a person who does not behave the way you expect is suppressing their authentic, real emotion. Ask. Don’t assume how the episode is ending, and is supposed to end.

When unpacking the emotional episodes, it is important to try to understand the dance that is being performed: the interpersonal goals.

Humility vis-à-vis another person’s emotions may always be a good idea—we all come from different places, have different experiences, and have unique goals—but it is particularly advisable when you are not part of the OURS of another person’s emotions. Yes, emotions differ across cultures in many different ways. At the same time, it is possible to relate to other people’s emotions once you meet them on their terms, once you humanize them.

We are partners in it together—emotional episodes are accomplished Between Us.

Our relationships, communities, and cultural realities make us who we are—emotions not excepted.

Let us explore emotions across cultural boundaries (gender, ethnicity, class, and race) by listening and observing, by closely examining, and by not imposing our ways of understanding emotions as the true or “natural” way.

#读书笔记