Culture and Emotional Development

When describing ontogenesis in the last chapter, we deliberately limited ourselves to the development of emotions in western cultures alone. Nearly all the studies cited came from an Anglo-American or German context. Such an explicit limitation means that we have proceeded as if one major condition underlying human development were a constant. This is the human-made culture-historical context in which individual development takes place. We have already pointed this out in our third look at emotional development in Chapter 1.