Is Stress a German Emotion?

An Anthropological Discussion on the Cultural Embeddedness of Stress

Text by Julia Faulhaber (University of Tübingen)

Art by Lisa Hannen

This essay explores whether stress can be considered a culturally embedded emotion, focusing on Germany as a case study. Beginning with the premise that emotions are culturally categorized feeling states, the essay examines the dual nature of stress as both a physiological experience and a cultural concept. Drawing on theoretical insights from psychological anthropology and affective sociology, it investigates stress as a historically and socially constructed practice that reflects the values and pressures of modern capitalist societies. Stress is framed as a biocultural phenomenon—rooted in bodily processes but shaped by cultural discourses of conformity and deviance. By situating stress within broader emotional and political frameworks, the essay argues that stress fulfills many criteria of an emotion, blending individual experience with social practices. This analysis invites further inquiry into whether stress might be a postmodern emotion, deeply entwined with contemporary societal dynamics.

Introduction

It was in my seminar on Psychological Anthropology that we read an article about the cultural constitution and embeddedness of emotions. I asked my students whether we have culture-specific emotions in Germany, if stress could be seen as a concept that is culture-specific or embedded in German practice, and whether stress could even be understood as an emotion to begin with. The first intuition of my students and me was to say “no”. Once we thought a little further, however, the answer did not seem so clear anymore. Let me introduce our discussion.

Is stress an emotion?

Many ideas, concepts, definitions, and perspectives surround the term emotion. To use a working definition for this article, it is helpful to understand emotions as culturally categorized feeling states concerned with an appraisal by a self in relation to persons, things, or events (Lynch 1990, 93).

So, is stress an emotion? Let’s argue for the case of Western Europe, or more specifically, Germany. In other societies or countries, the situation would probably look very different. Since emotions are culturally categorized feeling states, it only makes sense to look into one specific context. In my seminar, I asked my students who among them knew the feeling of being stressed. Everybody was familiar with it.  Even when I prompted them to describe how being stressed feels, their answers were very similar: racing heartbeat, nervousness, higher level of energy, increased sweating – obviously, with variations in the intensity according to the level of stress. Then, we further discussed whether stress is an exclusively negative feeling, and we concluded that this is not necessarily the case: there is also a feeling of positive stress. As examples of positive stress, we discussed situations that were not characterized by performance or any threats, but rather by excitement and joy, such as preparing and packing for a vacation, or as a player before an important football game. One thing irritated us, however: we were unsure whether stress was a state of being or a feeling, what the difference was, and if that changed anything surrounding the meaning of stress.

Now, I used the word “feeling” a lot in my explanations. Is stress then more of a feeling or rather a full-blown emotion? I mentioned the tremendous number of definitions of the term emotion – the same applies to feeling. The most basic understanding of feelings would probably be that they are best conceived as essentially shareable affective-intentional experiences within a meaningful understanding of self and world (for further reading, I suggest Thonhauser in von Scheve and Slaby 2019). The notion of feeling emphasizes the experiential dimension of an evaluative world orientation and situational self-awareness (Thonhauser 2019, 59). While feelings describe the subjective-experiential dimension, emotions tend to be socially constituted. Emotions signify the consolidated and categorically circumscribed sequences of affective world-relatedness (von Scheve and Slaby 2019, 43). So even though everybody, at least in my seminar, knows what ‘being stressed’ feels like, it is more than just a feeling, it is a cultural idea that developed historically. Stress, from a more practice-oriented perspective, is something that we do. Historian and cultural scientist Monique Scheer (2012) worked intensively on emotions as practices and outlined a theoretical and methodological framework for understanding and researching emotions as practices. She writes:

Emotions themselves can be viewed as a practical engagement with the world. Conceiving of emotions as practices means understanding them as emerging from bodily dispositions conditioned by a social context, which always has cultural and historical specificity (Scheer 2012, 193).

Understanding emotions and their embodied dimension as practices helps to grasp the political in them. If emotions, according to Scheer, are understood as cultural and performative practices, i.e. actions and articulations that affect social space and context, it quickly becomes clear that it is precisely this effect on a social space that can become something political. Something that we can see with stress in our cultural context. Stress becomes something highly political as its roots are seeked in historical explanations of a degenerated capitalism and the modern ‘Leistungsgesellschaft’ (‘achievement society’).

Art by Lisa Hannen

Stress has even been pathologized to the point of its accumulation being recognized as ‘burnout’. Burnout typically is accompanied by emotional exhaustion, a feeling of being overwhelmed, and reduced performance satisfaction (ICD-11 2022). According to the WHO, stress, defined “as a state of worry or mental tension caused by a difficult situation” (WHO 2023), counts as one of the biggest health risks of our time. It is almost as if pathologizing stress has become a way of dealing with the unrealistic expectations of capitalist society and economy[1].

Maybe Birgitt Röttger-Rössler’s work on the case of love for the Makassar in Sulawesi, Indonesia, offers a theoretical approach to exploring the cultural conception of stress in a German context. Falling in love or infatuation outside of marriage does not fit in a society that is built around arranged marriages (Röttger-Rössler 2002, 153). According to Röttger-Rössler, there is no exposed model of infatuation in this society. The cultural conception of the emotional relationship between spouses is also based on the fact that at the beginning of a marriage, there is no emotional bond and no intimate affection between the spouses, which only gradually develops. Love is understood as a gradual development process that begins with marriage (153). So, the feeling of falling in love is experienced and seen as a sickness. Garring lolo (“illness of young people”) is locally believed to be an illness caused by magic that exclusively affects young people of both sexes between the ages of 12 and 16. The symptoms are strikingly similar to the descriptions Western society has for infatuation (Röttger-Rössler 2002, 155). In this line of thought, it would be interesting to see if the symptoms of stress are experienced and labeled otherwise in different cultural, economic, and political contexts.

Culture-specific interpretation patterns of feelings integrate individuals into their social and cultural environments and adapt them to their respective requirements. So, are we doing something comparable with the experience of stress as the Makassar do with the one of infatuation? Are we taking symptoms, labeling them as stress, and using them as an excuse for “deviant” behavior? For example, telling our friends that we cannot meet them for coffee because we are currently so stressed. Or that we did not call our grandma back for a few days because our daily life was stressing us out. In Germany, stress is often recognized as a socially accepted explanation for certain behaviors. It can serve as a legitimate reason for nonconforming actions, such as missing a social engagement or not completing a task at work.

Conclusion

Emotions are more than verbally articulated symbols that point to a deeper social and cultural meaning. They can unfold as important embodied non-verbal communication and interaction practices. In addition to words, certain facial expressions and body postures are socialized through cultural transmission and intergenerational and peer negotiation. As biocultural processes (Hinton 1999; Markowitsch and Röttger-Rössler 2009) within and between individuals, the bodily representations and verbal articulations of emotions are linked to local discourses about appropriate and inappropriate experience, expression, and behavior (Hochschild 1979, 1983; Stodulka and Röttger-Rössler 2014; von Scheve 2009).

Stress, in my understanding, is something that most of us know. It is biocultural in the sense that it comes along with bodily and nervous system processes as well, and it seems that it is deeply embedded in cultural discourses on what are socially conforming or deviant experiences, expressions, and behaviors. Being stressed could further be understood as practice since we often do stress. And most importantly, stress is something that is felt and does something to one’s mood. I guess I would say stress does meet a lot of the “criteria” to earn the label of an emotion. It can be seen as both a culturally embedded practice and a feeling state concerned with an appraisal by a self in relation to persons, things, or events (Lynch 1990; Scheer 2019).

Notes

[1] This is not to be interpreted as a rejection of burnout as a valid diagnosis or an implication that stress cannot cause serious health issues.

References

Hinton, Alexander L., ed. 1999. Biocultural approaches to the emotions. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Hochschild, Arlie R. 1979. "Emotion Work, Feeling Rules and Social Structure." American Journal of Sociology 85: 551-575.

Hochschild, Arlie R. 1983. The managed heart: Commercialization of human feeling. Berkeley: University of California Press.

ICD-11. 2022. "QD85 Burnout." Accessed 13.09. https://icd.who.int/browse/2022-02/mms/en#129180281.

Lynch, Owen M. 1990. "The Social Construction of Emotion in India." In Divine Passions: The Social Construction of Emotion in India, edited by Owen M. Lynch. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Markowitsch, Hans J., and Birgitt  Röttger-Rössler, eds. 2009. Emotions as bio-cultural processes. New York: Springer.

Röttger-Rössler, Birgitt. 2002. "Emotion und Kultur: Einige Grundfragen." Zeitschrift für Ethnologie 127, no. 2: 147-162.

Scheer, Monique. 2012. "Are Emotions a kind of practice (and is that what makes them have a history)? A Bourdieiuan approach to understanding emotion." History and Theory 51: 193-220.

Scheer, Monique. 2019. "Emotion als kulturelle Praxis." In Emotionen. Ein interdisziplinäres Handbuch, edited by Hermann Kappelhoff, Jan-Hendrik Bakels, Hauke Lehmann and Christina Schmitt, 352-365. Berlin: J.B. Metzler.

Stodulka, Thomas, and Birgitt Röttger-Rössler, eds. 2014. Feelings at the Margins: Dealing with Violence, Stigma and Isolation in Indonesia. Frankfurt, New York: Campus.

Thonhauser, Gerhard. 2019. "Feeling." In Affective Societies. Key Conecpts, edited by Jan Slaby and Christian von Scheve. London & New York: Routledge.

von Scheve, Christian. 2009. Emotionen und soziale Strukturen. Die affektiven Grundlagen sozialer Ordnung. Frankfurt a.M.: Campus.

von Scheve, Christian, and Jan Slaby. 2019. "Emotion, emotion concept." In Affective Societies. Key Concepts, edited by Jan Slaby and Christian von Scheve, 42-51. New York: Routledge.

WHO. 2023. "Stress." Accessed 13.09. https://www.who.int/news-room/questions-and-answers/item/stress.