Emotions Are Culturally Conditioned States
Emotions are potent expressions that arise in response to physiological sensations in the body. They evolve naturally—guiding us either towards nourishment (positive emotions) or away from potential threats (negative emotions). Our emotional responses act as energetic amplifiers, neurochemically intensified and intricately woven together with our higher-order cognition to help ensure our survival.
Because of their neurochemical nature, emotions become addictive. They turn habitual—conditioned, taught, learned responses. Just as importantly, they're transmissible. We influence each other's emotional states, creating collective emotional patterns at family, community, and cultural levels. Indeed, we exist in an emotional ocean, an interwoven web made up of billions of emotional bodies constantly transmitting feelings, influencing, and conditioning each other's emotional responses. Our individual emotional experiences thus operate as nodes within a vast and intricately textured emotional network.
Right from birth, we absorb emotional conditioning from our immediate cultural environment, primarily through our caregivers. How they interpret their own sensory experiences and relay emotional meanings profoundly shapes how we internalise and interpret our sensations. This cultural dimension of emotion is foundational. At the root of every culture’s emotional life lies a fundamental set of assumptions regarding the very meaning and nature of existence itself.
Neuroscientist Joseph LeDoux, in his pioneering work "The Emotional Brain," explains the scientific nature and underlying neurobiology of emotions. LeDoux reveals how emotions emerge in the interplay between body, brain, and environment and highlights their pivotal role in survival and adaptation(1).
In Western civilisation, we have primarily conceptualised existence through lenses of separateness and duality. We habitually split reality into opposing elements—good versus evil, right versus wrong, us versus them—emphasising psychological separation of self from others. From this dualistic framework, fear, guilt, and shame quickly arise and embed themselves deeply into our emotional frames of reference. Emotional discomfort, therefore, often reinforces a personal narrative built around a perceived sense of individual fallibility and separateness, thus giving rise to contracted energy flows and restricted personal experience.
This Western emotional conditioning has profoundly shaped our collective relationship to money and material wealth. In the absence of emotional balance and interconnectedness, we've come to view money and possessions primarily as external regulators of our internal emotional lives. Consequently, wealth accumulation is increasingly seen as the principal means of reducing our emotional discomfort—our fears of insecurity, isolation, and inadequacy. Material affluence thus becomes an externalised attempt to control and modulate our inner neurochemical states, effectively becoming an extended form of our emotional addiction. This pattern inevitably leads to gross imbalance, both at an individual and societal level, driving overconsumption, ecological degradation, relentless competition, and widespread emotional dissatisfaction.
Yet, not all cultural emotional conditioning follows this trajectory. Other societies, whose core assumptions about life and relationships differ significantly, condition the emotions they amplify in entirely different ways. Consider several insightful examples:
In Tahitian culture, anthropologist Robert Levy discovered there is no apparent direct linguistic or experiential correlate for what English speakers call "guilt." Emotional reality is framed through relationships and social harmony. Rather than experiencing internalised guilt over an action, Tahitians interpret emotional discomfort as relational disharmony, shifting emphasis towards restoring interpersonal relationships and communal coherence(2). Emotional responses conditioned by their culture reflect an interconnected understanding of being, rather than one based on internalised personal inadequacy.
The emotional conditioning observed among traditional Inuit communities similarly emphasises relational harmony over individualised guilt or shame. Ethical transgressions manifest as disruptions of the community’s health, requiring restoration of social balance and communal wellbeing rather than fuelling inner narratives of shame or guilt(3).
Clifford Geertz’s seminal anthropological work in Balinese society illustrates unique emotional conditioning patterns. He observed that emotional energy flows primarily outward into collective social representations—reputation, communal dignity, honour—rather than inward toward private psychological states of guilt. Unlike Western emotional conditioning, Balinese emotional experiences prioritise socially performed roles and communal harmony, rather than introspective self-criticism(4).
Ruth Benedict’s landmark study of post-war Japanese culture, widely regarded in anthropological circles, further demonstrates cultural conditioning differences. Japanese emotional assumptions focus strongly on collective honour, respect, and dignity as outward-facing emotional experiences. Private guilt and shame are less culturally amplified. Instead, emotions are profoundly relational—shaped primarily through social context and communal dynamics(5).
These examples illustrate clearly how deeply cultural factors condition emotional experience. The modern Emotional Intelligence (EI) movement increasingly highlights the importance and value of heightened awareness of this conditioning process. Emotional intelligence underscores how emotional clarity and mindfulness support psychological and social wellbeing by unpacking conditioned emotional responses and enabling greater choice around how we interpret and respond emotionally.
Moreover, the wisdom perspective of non-duality has long articulated this insight about emotional conditioning. It emphasises that emotional states and psychological responses are predominantly conditioned processes. Aligning remarkably well with findings from evolutionary biology and contemporary neuroscience, non-duality recognises emotions as higher-order survival intelligence intimately connected to physiological sensations. At the same time, it highlights that around 99% of emotional reactions arise from learned habitual conditioning rooted in the fundamental illusion of psychological separateness: the perceived split into self versus other-than-self, a division which leads to feelings of isolation, contraction, anxiety, guilt and shame.
Fascinatingly, quantum theory provides a modern scientific lens which elegantly complements such insights. Quantum physics tells us reality emerges from dynamic quantum fluctuations—moments we anthropomorphise as "choice." At this fundamental level of existence, the contracted energy (negative or separate states) and expansive energy (positive connected states) are both seen simply as fluctuations in the continuous flow of universal reality itself.
As we recognise deeply that contracted emotional states—moments of fear, guilt, shame or perceived isolation—are natural energetic fluctuations arising from an indivisible underlying reality that is what non-duality points out is our essential nature, their power to reinforce an entirely separate and fallible personal self weakens considerably. Rather than reinforcing and layering contracted experiences through unconscious patterns of guilt, shame or inadequacy about the self, we instead experience emotional states simply as temporary energies moving naturally within the greater whole.
When this recognition deepens, our conditioned belief structures soften their hold. Emotional energies still arise, but we no longer feed them or amplify them through cultural conditioning built around self-blame and isolated separateness. Emotional flow naturally ebbs and rises—like waves shifting upon the ocean’s surface—arising, expressing and passing spontaneously without rigidly held narratives or beliefs.
Indeed, we each exist as unique points in this vast ocean of emotional expression, exchanging energetic states, culturally reconditioning emotional expressions, and continuously influencing one another’s inner landscapes. Through more profound recognition and awareness of these conditioned emotional patterns, we naturally soften emotional contractions, fostering emotional intelligence, compassion, openness, and greater wellbeing.
Love,
Freyja
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References:
(1) LeDoux, Joseph (1998). The Emotional Brain: The Mysterious Underpinnings of Emotional Life. Simon & Schuster.
(2) Levy, Robert I. (1973). Tahitians: Mind and Experience in the Society Islands. University of Chicago Press.
(3) Briggs, Jean L. (1970). Never in Anger: Portrait of an Eskimo Family. Harvard University Press.
(4) Geertz, Clifford (1973). The Interpretation of Cultures. Basic Books.
(5) Benedict, Ruth (1946). The Chrysanthemum and the Sword: Patterns of Japanese Culture. Houghton Mifflin Company.
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