How does our culture influence our feelings

The culture in which we live provides structure, guidelines, expectations, and rules to help us understand, interpret, and express various emotions. A "cultural display rule" is a culturally specific standard that governs the types and frequencies of emotional displays considered acceptable by a given culture.Cultural scripts dictate how positive and negative emotions should be experienced and displayed; they may also guide how people choose to regulate their emotions, ultimately influencing an individual's emotional experience.Cultural contexts also act as cues when people are trying to interpret facial expressions. This means that different cultures may interpret the same social context in very different ways.Despite different emotional display rules, our ability to recognize and produce basic facial expressions of emotion appears to be universal. In fact, research has discovered seven basic types of emotions expressed in human faces: sadness, happiness, disgust, surprise, anger, contempt, and fear.Complex emotions such as jealousy, love, and pride are different from basic emotions and are more likely to be dependent on cultural influences than are more basic emotions.