The focus of the present ethnographic study is on the role of emotions in school education. Emotions seem to be a more ‘implicit’ part in education, although they have strong impact on learning situations as well as on the self-concept of the individual. Furthermore, the cognitive and social education of a person cannot be considered without the involvement of emotions. ‘Emotion culture’ and emotional behavioural expressions are deeply influenced by culture and can be considered as important elements in the process of socialisation and as a basis for the interpretation of emotions (Benedict 2008). The key elements of an ‘emotion culture’ comprise a cultural knowledge of emotions, which refers to the available experiences with appropriate displays of emotion, emotional valence, which is linked to the positive and negative assessment of certain emotions, and an emotion vocabulary shaped by culture, which gives names to emotions, describes them and allows them to be processed reflexively (cf. Turner/Stets 2007). Interdisciplinary research attributes omnipresent significance to emotions, and the neural circuits, which are formed by adaptation processes to the environment, are most intensive in childhood and adolescence (cf. Singer 2010, Damasio 2001). And even though emotions influence school life in a complex way, they seem to be rather absent in the pedagogical-scientific discourse both in Germany and Japan. In school ‘emotional education’ belongs more to the implicit tasks of pedagogy; however emotions play an important role in processing feelings and emotions, insofar as institutional ‘feeling rules’ and ‘display standards’ shaped by culture are negotiated in class (cf. Hochschild 1979; Hayashi et al. 2009). ‘Education’ concentrates primarily on training of measurable, comparable cognitive-intellectual competences, the physical-emotional integrated being of the individual is often disregarded (cf. Wulf/Zirfas 2007; Kellermann/Mattig 2011). However, not only the result, but also the process of educating oneself, is of interest (Suzuki/Wulf 2007; Wulf/Zirfas 2007). This contribution concerns the social dimension of emotions, more precisely: the social performance of developing emotions and their effects on pedagogical situations in a German and a Japanese primary school. The notion of social performance refers to both the generative, creative aspect of the current exhibit of emotional expression and the culture-specific expression model, the form. In a pedagogical context, it also deals with the assessment of the competence aspects of emotional expressive behaviour, among others (cf. Goffman et al 1986). Exemplary findings from the data of a cross-cultural project in Germany and in Japan will show how (1) emotions of discomfort and unease are modelled in different cultural contexts, (2) the concept of ‘community’ is developed in the two different cultural contexts, and (3) status representations of the teacher or students are manifested in both countries in gestural-emotional expressive forms (cf. Kemper 2007). In the reconstruction of the classroom scenes, similarities and differences become clear, which give and show information on the respective ‘emotion culture’, how sociality is developed and handled by means of emotions. Due to their sensual-physical properties emotions and gestures are conceptualised as two dimensions of sociality (cf. Niedenthal 2010), which deserve special attention in pedagogical discourse.

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