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Accepted Paper:
Socializing emotions as an analytical concept for understanding psychocultural processes
Leberecht Funk
(Free University of Berlin)
In this paper I refer to socializing emotions as an analytical concept which was derived from cultural schema theory and Quinn’s work on cultural transmission. I mostly draw on ethnographic examples from my own research in Taiwan but also on my colleagues’ research in Indonesia and Madagascar.
Paper long abstract:
The research project Socialization and Ontogeny of Emotions in Cross-Cultural Perspective (2009-2014, Freie Universität Berlin) was located at the interface of social anthropological and developmental psychological research. It aimed at investigating to what extend cultural factors affect the transmission of emotional knowledge, patterns of emotional behavior and emotion regulation from birth to puberty. Long-term anthropological fieldwork was carried out in Madagascar, Indonesia and Taiwan (Röttger-Rössler et al. 2013; Röttger-Rössler et al. 2015). The project’s theoretical assumptions had been influenced in multiple ways by the writings of Naomi Quinn, especially her 2005 article Universals of Child Rearing in which she assumes that caregivers in all societies prepare young children for later lessons to come by making use of emotionally arousing socialization practices. My colleagues and I discovered that in each socio-cultural setting there are one or two distinct socializing emotions (e. g. „fear“, „anxiety“; „shame“) which play a leading role in the formation of culturally-specific emotion repertoires. Furthermore, our analysis shows that early emotionally arousing childhood experiences, which are interwoven with ontological beliefs and social structures, do not only shape the socialization process, but also have an impact on the formation of other emotions such as „anger“. The existence of several socializing emotions leads to a revision of developmental psychological assumptions of universal emotional development. In this paper, I present some results from our research, mostly drawing on ethnographic examples form my own research among the Tao in Taiwan (Funk 2020).