The old nature/nurture debate has been applied to just about every facet of human experience. Are we ‘born’ the way we are, or are we ‘shaped’ by experience? Of course, it doesn’t have to be either/or. It can equally well be both/and.

It seems there is a set of universals or ‘human givens’ that make us identifiably human, and then there are cultural specifics which make us interestingly different from one another. Confusion arises because we often muddle these up, and assume that what is really environmental learning is fixed and ‘pre-programmed’, and that what are really innate characteristics have been shaped by culture.

For example, psychologist Paul Ekman famously demonstrated that facial expressions of emotion are not culturally determined but universal. He studied isolated tribes who had had no contact with the wider world and found that expressions of sadness, anger, fear and so forth were expressed through the same facial muscular networks (expressions) as anywhere else. These findings contradicted some theories of emotional expression current at the time.

In a fascinating study which echoes Ekman, Thomas Fritz led a team of researchers to Cameroon in Africa, where they found evidence that similar combinations of musical notes provoke similar emotions in the people listening to them, and these responses do not appear to be culturally determined. It is true that musical appreciation is more strongly influenced by culture, but human beings appear to process music emotionally in fundamentally the same way.

That’s more evidence to make us even more cautious about jumping to conclusions about nature/nurture distinctions – a controversy which (speaking of emotions) is still holding up progress in dealing with depression, for instance. Sadness is a universal human experience – a direct emotion. But depression is much more akin to ‘musical appreciation’ – that is, depression is what we make of the emotion of sadness. And we learn what to make of it from those around us. In other words, depression can be socially learned.