What is an example of an emotion that has changed over time or across cultures?

Happiness has changed in interesting ways. As my colleague Tiffany Watt Smith writes in The Book of Human Emotions (2015), in the 16th century, authors of self-help books were encouraging people to be sad. Today, happiness is seen as the most important life goal. Governments and psychologists have developed ways to measure and quantify happiness in the population, and there’s a whole industry built around creating it. Happiness has always been considered a fleeting emotion, but the idea that we can actually engineer it is new. What’s particularly significant is the way that happiness has become bound up with the drive for success. So that one cannot simply be happy, one must put that happiness to work to achieve goals and thus become even happier. We have really limited the scope of what happiness might be, by binding it so closely to the idea of success and material gain. By entangling the idea of happiness with measures of health and achievement, I fear that we have transformed the feeling into another kind of work.

If culture determines what and how an individual feels, do our emotional repertoires differ across continents? What emotions are we ‘missing’ because they are not valued by British society?

Different languages contain different emotional vocabularies. In Japan there is a word, amae, which means the feeling of dependence on another person – a family member, a lover, a friend – and the knowledge that your needs will be met unconditionally by that person. Anthropologists have argued that amae is a key example of the way that our emotions are socially constructed: in Japan’s more collectivist culture, absolute trust in other members of the group is necessary in a way that it is not in more individualistic environments. That we don’t have a word for amae in the English language might give us insight into what emotions are made possible within a given society. Does the fact that we have no equivalent reveal something about our attitude to gratitude or our privileging of self-sufficiency?

Are there any striking examples of governments attempting to shape or control peoples’ emotions?

My feeling is that we should be very wary of the ways that powerful institutions and governmental bodies can place particular emotions in the service of dominant ideology. Envy is an interesting example. Where jealousy is usually defined in terms of interpersonal relationships, envy is associated with the desire for someone else’s material possessions. What is interesting is the way that envy has also served a political purpose: by dismissing complaints regarding wealth disparity as simply manifestations of a negative emotion, it is possible to discredit the quite legitimate grievances of the marginalised. When someone from a low-income background expresses anger at the ostentatious wealth of a city banker, say, it is easy to diffuse the political power of that righteous anger by reclassifying it as, simply, envy.