Cross-cultural emotion research is of major interest for both cross-cultural psychology and for general emotion research. On the one hand, emotions can be characterised as basic human processes whose main function is to detect events that are relevant for the concerns of the organism and to prepare for appropriate action. As a major relevance detection mechanism, emotions offer an interesting perspective for studying culture. Which events arouse emotions and which specific emotions are aroused by those events can be considered particularly revealing for the concerns of a culture and the way it interprets the daily environment. On the other hand, cross-cultural emotion research can also contribute to general emotion research. Historically, cross-cultural emotion research is characterized by the dichotomy between universalistic and relativistic conceptualizations of emotions, with the former focusing on the biological innateness of the emotion process and latter focusing on the embeddedness of emotions within specific cultural systems. Both stances have generated their own substantive evidence. Nowadays, the research question whether emotions are universal or culture-specific is neither fruitful nor defensible. The research question rather is at which stage universal aspects of emotional functioning turn into culturally-moulded aspects. Answers to this research question are revealing for the flexibility and plasticity of the emotion processes, and are thus of interest for general emotion research.