TYPES OF CULTURES AND SOCIAL EMOTIONS
TYPES OF CULTURES AND SOCIAL EMOTIONS

Summary/Abstract: Emotions are associated with people and it is human to interact emotionally. The concepts of emotions may refer to both types personal and social ones.In this paper we concentrate on an inter-disciplinary study of the emotion concepts as social constructions and offer a synthesis of various researches devoted to the issue, scholars who consider the phenomenon of emotions from the perspective of Psychology, Philosophy, Sociology, Anthropology and Cultural Linguistics.A very important condition in researching emotion concepts interculturally is the type of culture where this idea was born, developed and turned into a mental model or a cognitive scenario. As a rule, an apparently similar concept like “love” or “happiness”, ideas found in almost every culture are associated with certain socio-cultural environment typical of the very culture. Even if linguistically, there are equivalents to the notion of “happiness” in many languages, the situations associated with this idea might be different among cultures.This research is a contribution to the existing studies devoted to intercultural communication which are extremely necessary as they enlarge human awareness of various cultural traditions and behaviour and contribute to the development of the intercultural competence.We focus on the concepts of “shame” and “guilt” in high and low context types of cultures as well in collectivist and individualist cultures and also in shame and guilt types of cultures according to Ruth Benedict.

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