Topic > Importance of knowledge Shared and personal knowledge…

It is suggested that there are six emotions experienced in all cultures; happiness, sadness, fear, anger, surprise and disgust. This would illustrate emotion as a way to gain shared knowledge because everyone understands the same things about it. However, there appear to be many examples of non-universal, culturally bound emotions, such as the Chinese notion of "sad love", a feeling of sadness with added intensity and complexity from love. Therefore another point of view is that emotions do not have a natural basis and that in fact they depend on social consciousness. For example, the emotion of shame appears to arise from a notion of right and wrong. Different cultures have differences in their moral codes, so they would experience shame differently. The idea here is that emotion is culture-dependent rather than universal and is shaped by social predispositions. Both of these ideas would suggest that emotion is not so personal and that shared knowledge in culture can shape what emotions are like