Batja Mesquita

During her time at CASBS, Batja Mesquita will work on a book on emotional literacy. Ever since Goleman’s 1995 book Emotional Intelligence (Bantam, 1995), social-emotional skills have been recognized as a key to individual success; no less important than cognitive ability. But is   emotional literacy universal? Current literacy programs in schools tacitly assume universality but unwittingly prescribe the dominant culture’s ways of doing emotions and relationships, thus privileging students whose home culture corresponds with the school culture. Mesquita’s plan for the fellowship will be to develop a framework for introducing culture into emotion literacy, thereby cultivating social-emotional skills of students that surmount a specific cultural context.  The planned book will be useful for parents, teachers and therapists.

Mesquita is a distinguished professor of social and cultural psychology at the University of Leuven, Belgium. Her research focuses on emotions as embodiments of group and cultural morality, and thereby as key processes of social cohesion.  Her research has spanned a wide range of topics, including the dynamics of cultural shaping of emotions, the spreading of emotions in groups, interpersonal emotions, and emotional acculturation. It has shown that emotional fit and misfit has consequences for personal and social wellbeing, for acculturation outcomes, and for group outcomes. Her book Between Us (Norton, 2022) introduced these topics to a larger audience, and has been translated into seven languages. It was conceived during her 2016-17 CASBS fellowship.