39 Emotions in social situations

People’s emotions don’t occur in a vacuum: they are always embedded in people’s social relationships and the broader cultural context in which they engage. Understanding people’s emotional functioning, then, implies understanding how they experience and regulate emotions across different social relationships and cultural contexts. In this chapter, we first outline a dynamic socio-cultural approach to emotion. Subsequently, we show how both people’s emotional experiences and regulation attempts are shaped by characteristics of the particular social relationship in which they occur as well as by the meanings and practices that are salient in their cultural context, each time highlighting the role of communication and language. In closing, we outline some of the current insights and limitations of this review, as well as describe some future directions for a multidisciplinary context-sensitive science of emotion research.