Author Replies 327 Author Reply: The “Social” Is Not Merely Another Level of Reality Batja Mesquita Center for Social and Cultural Psychology, University of Leuven, Belgium Abstract It is time to abandon essentialism in emotional research: Our sociodynamic model (Mesquita & Boiger, 2014) proposes to study emotions as contextualized processes, rather than as states. This does not mean eschewing mental processes, but rather studying them dynamically and in open interaction with their environment. Our proposal is not to shift the focus of emotion studies to a different level. Rather, placing emotions in their social context renders their psychological qualities understandable and predictable. This is illustrated by some examples from my own cross-cultural research. Keywords appraisal, culture, essentialism, sociodynamic model At the end of his commentary, Richard Shweder calls for more cross-cultural data to inform our theories of emotion: “One does look forward … to tasting (or at least reading) more on-line … empirical reports from diverse cultural settings. I for one will wait for the tasting; and only then draw strong conclusions about the nature and distribution of the ‘emotions.’” (Shweder, 2014, p. 323). I was struck by this call for “tasting,” because this is exactly how I started my career as a cultural psychologist interested in emotions. For the first 15 years of my research career, I “tasted” emotional experiences in different cultures (Mesquita, 1993, 2001; Mesquita & Karasawa, 2002), and I catalogued the many ways in which these experiences were different, based on both my own and other people’s research (Mesquita & Frijda, 1992; Mesquita, Frijda, & Scherer, 1997). The work showed that it is certainly possible to describe cultural differences in emotions in terms of their compo- nents: In questionnaire research we found cross-cultural variations in terms of the appraisal, action readiness, behavior, and long-last- ing cognitive consequences that constitute certain emotions. The different lower level patterns across cultures gave us little reason to assume that emotions were essences (see Zachar, 2014). But I have come to take nonessentialism one step further, aban- doning the idea of emotions as states, and focusing instead on emotions as processes that develop in context. Granted, it is pos- sible to describe the emotions of a person at one point in time and out-of-context, just as it is possible for a biologist to describe the anatomy or the state of a plant without considering its environ- ment, but we miss some indispensible information. No biologist would describe the leaves of the plant as brown, without relating this to the fact that the soil is water-deficient. In contrast, many emotion psychologists seem satisfied describing the phenomenon of interest out of context (see, Mesquita, 2010): The focus of much of the field’s theorizing is on emotions as static entities, rather than on emoting as a contextualized process. When I started my cross-cultural research, I asked large groups of participants from each culture to freely describe emo- tional episodes (to interviewers with the same cultural back- grounds). The goal was to supplement the existing appraisal and action readiness questionnaires with culture-specific dimen- sions (see Mesquita, 2001). However, it gave me the unantici- pated advantage of looking at hundreds of emotion narratives in Dutch, Turkish-Dutch, and Surinamese-Dutch immigrants, European Americans, Mexican Americans, and Japanese. Appraisal (or componential) theory could be meaningfully imposed on the data, and yielded interesting cultural differences in the constituting components of emotions. However, these interviews told me a story of their own, which moved well beyond the variations in appraisal and action readiness. First, the interviews were not so much stories about inner feelings, not even stories of individuals’ perceptions of the world, but to a large extent, they were the stories of individuals relating to their social contexts. For the most part, they reflected the shifting posi- tion of the individual in a dyadic relationship, or in a larger social context; emotions in many cases mirrored either shifts in power or status (see Clay-Warner, 2014), or shifts with regard to other social dimensions such as closeness or warmth (Wiggins, 1979). The sec- ond story that these interviews told us was that emotions develop over time, and in connection with events in the environment. I was trained, to use Moors’ phrasing (2014), as a second flavor appraisal theorist (having completed my training with Nico Frijda). From this vantage point, it is easy to ignore the story that the narratives told us. We did everything to examine the data only from within the restrictions of our theory, but what the stories really told us was something outside the scope of our appraisal theory: emotions are part of social interactions and events, and they develop over time. For example, we asked North American and Japanese partici- pants to describe an event in which someone else—in this case, someone not intimate—had offended them. In the typical American scenario for offense by a nonintimate other, the event was part of a buildup. But even if we restricted ourselves to the definitive blow, participants’ appraisals and action readiness were spun out over a longer period of time. Participants reported how they tried to gain approval from others for their own view that the offender was wrong or even a bad person. This approval then Author note: This research was supported by a research fund of the University of Leuven. I want to thank Michael Boiger and Lisa Feldman Barrett for their helpful comments on an earlier version of the manuscript. Corresponding author: Batja Mesquita, Center for Social and Cultural Psychology, University of Leuven, Tiensestraat 102, bus 3727, Leuven, 3000, Belgium. Email: mesquita@psy.kuleuven.be at KU Leuven University Library on March 25, 2015 emr.sagepub.com Downloaded from