Understanding Emotion In Chinese Culture

This mind-opening take on indigenous psychology presents a multi-level analysis of culture to frame the differences between Chinese and Western cognitive and emotive styles. Eastern and Western cultures are seen here as mirror images in terms of rationality, relational thinking, and symmetry or harmony. Examples from the philosophical texts of Confucianism, Daoism, Buddhism, and classical poetry illustrate constructs of shading and nuancing emotions in contrast to discrete emotions and emotion regulation commonly associated with traditional psychology. The resulting text offers readers bold new understandings of emotion-based states both familiar (intimacy, solitude) and unfamiliar (resonance, being spoiled rotten), as well as larger concepts of freedom, creativity, and love. Included among the topics: The mirror universes of East and West. In the crucible of Confucianism. Freedom and emotion: Daoist recipes for authenticity and creativity. Chinese creativity, with special focus on solitude and its seekers. Savoring, from aesthetics to the everyday. What is an emotion? Answers from a wild garden of knowledge. Understanding Emotion in Chinese Culture has a wealth of research and study potential for undergraduate and graduate courses in affective science, cognitive psychology, cultural and cross- cultural psychology, indigenous psychology, multicultural studies, Asian psychology, theoretical and philosophical psychology, anthropology, sociology, international psychology, and regional studies.

This study examines the suffering narratives of the Bimo and Christian religious communities of the Yi minority who reside in the remote mountains of Sichuan and Yunnan, China, respectively. It is informed by the theoretical framework of ecological rationality, which posits that religions influence and are influenced by cognitive styles that have co-evolved with the ecological niche of a culture. It was predicted and found that in times of adversity, traditional religious communities differ in emotion expression, causal attribution, and help-seeking behavior, with far-reaching ramifications for how they are uniquely vulnerable to the ravages of modernization. The authors hope that the voices of the study participants, heard through their harrowing narratives, may inspire a deepened sensitivity to the plight of rural Chinese communities as China races to become a superpower in the global economy.

Emotion takes place. Rather than an interior state of mind in response to the outside world, emotion per se is spatial, at turns embedding us from without, transporting us somewhere else, or putting us ahead of ourselves. In this book, Ling Hon Lam gives a deeply original account of the history of emotions in Chinese literature and culture centered on the idea of emotion as space, which the Chinese call “emotion-realm” (qingjing). Lam traces how the emotion-realm underwent significant transformations from the dreamscape to theatricality in sixteenth- to eighteenth-century China. Whereas medieval dreamscapes delivered the subject into one illusory mood after another, early modern theatricality turned the dreamer into a spectator who is no longer falling through endless oneiric layers but pausing in front of the dream. Through the lens of this genealogy of emotion-realms, Lam remaps the Chinese histories of morals, theater, and knowledge production, which converge at the emergence of sympathy, redefined as the dissonance among the dimensions of the emotion-realm pertaining to theatricality.The book challenges the conventional reading of Chinese literature as premised on interior subjectivity, examines historical changes in the spatial logic of performance through media and theater archaeologies, and ultimately uncovers the different trajectories that brought China and the West to the convergence point of theatricality marked by self-deception and mutual misreading. A major rethinking of key terms in Chinese culture from a comparative perspective, The Spatiality of Emotion in Early Modern China develops a new critical vocabulary to conceptualize history and existence.

Chinese medicine approaches emotions and emotional disorders differently than the Western biomedical model. Transforming Emotions with Chinese Medicine offers an ethnographic account of emotion-related disorders as they are conceived, talked about, experienced, and treated in clinics of Chinese medicine in contemporary China. While Chinese medicine (zhongyi) has been predominantly categorized as herbal therapy that treats physical disorders, it is also well known that Chinese patients routinely go to zhongyi clinics for treatment of illness that might be diagnosed as psychological or emotional in the West. Through participant observation, interviews, case studies, and zhongyi publications, both classic and modern, the author explores the Chinese notion of "body-person," unravels cultural constructions of emotion, and examines the way Chinese medicine manipulates body-mind connections.

This ground-breaking handbook provides multi-disciplinary insight into Chinese morality, cognition and emotion by collecting in one place a comprehensive collection of essays focused on Chinese morality by world-leading experts from more than a dozen different academic fields of study. Through fifteen substantive chapters, readers are offered a holistic look into the ways morality could be interpreted in China, and a broad range of theoretical perspectives, including ecological, anthropological and cultural neuroscience. Offering a syncretic, multi-disciplinary overview that moves beyond the usual western-oriented perspective of China as a monolithic culture, research questions addressed in this book focus on morality as represented at the level of the individual, rather than at the group or institutional levels. Research questions explored herein include: What are the major contours of distinctively Chinese morality? What was the role of the ancient ecology, climate, and pathogen load in producing Chinese moral attitudes and emotions? Are ingredients of the good life in China different than ingredients of the good life elsewhere? How are children in China morally educated? How do findings from cultural neuroscience help us understand differences in the treatment of family members, or the treatment of strangers, in China and elsewhere? How do the protests in Hong Kong participate in, or stand apart from, the ongoing ethics of protest in historical China? The clear structure and accessible writing offer a rigorous assessment of the ways in which morality can be interpreted, shedding light on differences between China and Western cultures. The book also provides a timely window into Chinese forms of morality, and the pivotal role these play in social organization, family relationships, systems of government, emotion and cognition. Representing fields of study ranging from philosophy, linguistics, archaeology, history, and religion, to social psychology, neuroscience, clinical psychology, developmental psychology, and behavioral ecology, this is an essential text for students, academics, and others with wide interest in Chinese culture.

This is a PhD dissertation that analyzes the metaphors and metonymies found in Chinese emotion concepts, such as ANGER, FEAR, HAPPINESS, SADNESS, and WORRY and looks at the role of culture in the folk models which structure them. Completed in 1989, it was the first detailed attempt to look at Chinese emotion metaphors using the Cognitive Linguistic Framework developed in Metaphors We Live By (Lakoff and Johnson 1980). The content should be equally accessible to cognitive linguists interested in Chinese metaphors, universals of metaphors, emotion metaphors, or to Chinese language learners wanting to expand their vocabulary in a meaningful and systematic way.

This book is a cognitive semantic study of the Chinese conceptualization of the heart, traditionally seen as the central faculty of cognition. The Chinese word xin, which primarily denotes the heart organ, covers the meanings of both "heart" and "mind" as understood in English, which upholds a heart-head dichotomy. In contrast to the Western dualist view, Chinese takes on a more holistic view that sees the heart as the center of both emotions and thought. The contrast characterizes two cultural traditions that have developed different conceptualizations of person, self, and agent of cognition. The concept of "heart" lies at the core of Chinese thought and medicine, and its importance to Chinese culture is extensively manifested in the Chinese language. Diachronically, this book traces the roots of its conception in ancient Chinese philosophy and traditional Chinese medicine. Along the synchronic dimension, it not only makes a systematic analysis of conventionalized expressions that reflect the underlying cultural models and conceptualizations, as well as underlying conceptual metaphors and metonymies, but also attempts a textual analysis of an essay and a number of poems for their metaphoric and metonymic images and imports contributing to the cultural models and conceptualizations. It also takes up a comparative perspective that sheds light on similarities and differences between Western and Chinese cultures in the understanding of the heart, brain, body, mind, self, and person. The book contributes to the understanding of the embodied nature of human cognition situated in its cultural context, and the relationship between language, culture, and cognition.

Against the background of the media commercialization reform since the 1990s in China and drawing on the case of »X-Change« (2006-2019), Wei Dong investigates the affective meaning-making mechanism in the multimodal text of Chinese reality TV. The focus lies on the ways in which emotions are appropriated and disciplined by regimes of power and identity, and the ways in which affect - in this case primarily kuqing (bitter emotions) communicated by the material and the body - have the potential to challenge or exceed existing relations of power in the mediascape. Wei Dong shows how Chinese reality TV provides a historical and theoretical opportunity for understanding the affective structures of contemporary China in the dynamic process of fracture and integration.