The cultural evolution of emotion

Scholarly debates about the nature of human emotion traditionally pit biological and cultural influences against one another. Although many existing theories acknowledge the role of culture, they mostly treat emotion categories such as ‘anger’ as biological products. In this Perspective, we summarize traditional assumptions about the roles of biology and culture in emotion alongside supporting and conflicting empirical evidence. Building on constructionist models of emotion, we introduce a cultural evolutionary perspective that moves beyond a strict biology-versus-culture dichotomy. This cultural evolutionary perspective uses dual inheritance models of cultural transmission to explain how variation in emotion can arise across groups, how affect-laden information can travel throughout populations, and why people in different cultures use both similar and different emotion concepts and non-verbal expressions. This cultural evolution framework allows for new hypotheses about the development of emotion categories and challenges longstanding claims about the universality of emotion.