Emotions and Everyday Life in Cuba

Abstract

Investigates the quality of everyday emotional experience in Cuba, a cultural context profoundly different from those previously analysed. A questionnaire was completed by 153 students of Havana University (age 17–28 years). They were asked to report an emotion-eliciting episode that had happened to them and to answer some questions concerning the content of the episode, i.e., antecedent, contextual aspects, cognitive evaluations, reactions, and social sharing of the emotion. The results indicated that positive emotions accounted for about 50% of everyday emotional experience and were significantly associated with high intensity. The antecedents most frequently cited were of a relational type and involved family, partner, and friends. The results are discussed in the light of previous studies on emotion antecedents conducted in Europe and in the US. It is argued that the Cuban cultural context presents some interesting peculiarities, which may influence the presence of specific typologies of emotion and the quality of subjective everyday experience.