Culture: Emotion and Social Construction PDF

Emotion Learning objectives: - The concepts of emotions and culture - Cross-cultural similarities and differences in experience and expression of emotion - Cultural dimensions used to investigate cross-cultural differences in emotion What are emotions? - Episodic, short-term, b...

Emotion Learning objectives: - The concepts of emotions and culture - Cross-cultural similarities and differences in experience and expression of emotion - Cultural dimensions used to investigate cross-cultural differences in emotion What are emotions? - Episodic, short-term, biologically based patterns of perception, experience, physiology, action, and communication that occur in response to specific physical and social challenges and opportunities Emotions- key features - Brief responses to things, people, events, and our thoughts - Have social functions - Involve different components (evaluation, physiological changes, expressions, subjective experience, mental processes, behavioural dispositions) - Tools by which we evaluate experience and prepare to act Theories of emotion - Testable statements about emotions - Consider and emphasise different components of emotion - Evolutionary theories - Appraisal theories - Constructionist theories **Evolutionary theories** - Charles Darwin and Paul Ekman - Emotions are feelings and dispositions to act - Continuity between human and animal expressions - Emotions have survival and signalling functions: 'serviceable habits' - Emphasis on facial expressions - Focus on basic emotions - Main emotions- anger, fear, disgust, surprise, happiness, sadness **Appraisal theories** - To arouse an emotion, the object must be appraised (assess the value of) as affecting me in some way, affecting me personally as an individual with my particular experience and my particular aims (Magda Arnold) - Emotions involve action tendencies and physiological changes - Patterns differ for different emotions - Nico Frijda and Klaus Scherer **Social constructionism:** body and mind - William James: emotion is awareness of physiological adjustments in response to an exciting event - Emotions = bodily changes - Autonomic nervous system, facial and bodily feedback - James Averill: emotions are social constructions, and they can be fully understood only on a social level of analysis - A socially prescribed set of responses to be followed by a person in each situation - Emotions are learned by being socialised into a particular culture - Lisa Feldman Barrett: emotions are constructed from social and historical knowledge Culture - Part of the environment made by humans (Oyserman, 2017) - A set of patterns of historically derived beliefs and their embodiment in institutions, practices, and artifacts - What **influences people's behaviour** in each time and context Functions of culture - Provides predictability - Perpetuates social rules and expectations - Facilitates successful life in groups and social coordination, sustains individual welfare - Clarifies group boundaries - Feels like reality - We need to step out of culture to notice it What cultures are there? - Countries -- easiest way to study culture - But cultural groupings do not always mean countries - Many levels of culture- many subcultures which are part of a larger culture - Other examples- social class, religion, skin colour, professions, political preferences