Psychology Commons^™

Interpersonal Emotions As Emergent Phenomena: Social Neuroscience Beyond Western Cultural Constructions, Kaitlyn Penchina

Scripps Senior Theses

Because science as it exists today is a cultural construction of the West, studies of neuroscience have often been limited by Western perspectives. In particular, the Western proclivity towards individualism has led to a field of neuroscience which has historically focused on studying single individuals, as opposed to social or collective neuroscience. For the most part, it has just been assumed that collective phenomena such as interpersonal emotions must be able to be reduced in terms of individual phenomena such as individual emotions. However, closer review reveals that interpersonal emotions have emergent properties that individual emotions alone do not account …