This week, I was really excited to read the chapter because it talks about my emotions – my favorite topic to discuss with respect to culture. Personally, I think culture plays a significant role in the feeling, expression and interpretation of emotions. After reading the chapter, I can summarize and elaborate some key takeaways.
Firstly, we can talk about the cultural variations in emotional focus, for example, the Western cultures focus more on individually induced emotions like pride or autonomy whereas the Eastern cultures focus more on collectively induced emotions like harmony or honor. If I think about this aspect in my own culture, it would be relevant in the sense that the ‘family’ feels together. What I mean by this is that parents might often question their children ‘We feel happy when the X guests come over, why don’t you feel happy?’, ‘We like going out to eat, why don’t you like that?’ So, the emotions felt by the family are the emotions that must be felt by all the individuals within that system of family. Emotions in my culture are more about ‘us’ and less about ‘me’. It is always about ‘our’ failures or ‘our’ achievements as a family. This might also show up as comparisons between the children in academics or extracurriculars indicating how one child is achieving a lot while the other child isn’t and how this is problematic since it does not reflect harmony (collective emotion) within the family.
Secondly, I was definitely expecting to read about suppression in this chapter and I was not surprised to find out that Eastern cultures focus on suppressing emotions to maintain group harmony. This is a prevalent behavior I have seen throughout my life. I think it is a common culture in Pakistan to suppress emotions often to respect the elders or to keep the peace. This unhealthy avoidance of emotional expression causes passive-aggressive behaviors leading to poor family dynamics, especially in newlywed couples. Coming from a Pakistani family, I grew up thinking emotional expression is weird, and even though I have changed myself into a person who expresses what she feels, to date a part of me still values interpersonal relations over my emotions.
While reading about religion, I could truly understand and apply it to myself and my culture because Islam plays a huge role in our expression of emotions. For example, Islam teaches us the concept of ‘sabar‘ (patience) which means going through hardships yet not feeling hopeless by keeping our belief firm in Allah. This is a key point that keeps Muslims from feeling angry or frustrated with others as they practise self-restraint.
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