Culture and Emotion 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 Culture and Emotion 2 Learning objectives: - The concepts of emotions and culture - Cross-cultural similarities and differences in experience and expression of emotion - Culture dimensions used to investigate cross-cultural differences in emotion Cultural psychology - Focuses on the universal mechanisms by which the everyday cues that are particular to a society, time, and place are interpreted to form perception, judgement, and behaviour (oysterman, 2017) Challenges of cross-cultural psychology - Culture is understudied - Cultural expertise is transparent - This also applies to psychologists - Broad claims only tested in WEIRD samples - **W**estern - **E**ducated - **I**ndustrialised - **R**ich - **D**emocratic - Reliance on WEIRD samples is problematic for psychology - Easy to miss the influence of culture - Psychological theories may be limited - Questions only relevant to specific countries - Answers may only fit people from certain parts of the world - Cultures are changing - Migration - Demographic differences between groups - Population growth - Social stratification - Measuring complex psychological processes Measuring emotions is a challenge - Questionnaires and self-report - Reaction times - Decision-making - Facial expressions and movements/gestures - Physiological measures: heart rate, blood pressure, skin conductance, hormone levels - Neuroimaging - Many measures- none of them perfect Emotion theories - Testable statements about emotions - Evolutionary theories - Appraisal theories - Constructionist theories - Consider and emphasise different components of emotion - Theoretical perspectives on emotion affect how emotions are studied across cultures - Evolutionary viewpoints tend to emphasise biology or innate capacities - Constructionist theories highlight the importance of context and cultural learning Social constructionism is the theory that people develop knowledge of the world in a social context and that much of what we perceive as reality depends on shared assumptions The Universality Hypothesis - Are emotions innate or culturally learned? - Long-standing debate in emotion research - Universal = shared by humans of any gender, race and culture OR product of cultural evolution? - If innate and universal = a lot of cross-cultural similarity - If learned= little or no similarity - Important to evolutionary theorists Looking for universal emotions - Would people all over the world recognise the same expressions as signifying the same emotion? - Studies of 6 basic emotions (e.g. Ekman, Sorenson, and Friesen, 1969) - Matching photographs of posed expressions with emotion labels - People label photographs accurately at rates greater than chance - Could these findings be due to cultural learning? - Studies of isolated preliterate cultures e.g. tribes in Papua New Guinea - Simple stories about emotional situationation e.g. 'her friends have come, and she is happy' - Matching the stories to photographs of facial expressions - Production of facial expressions - Agreement across cultures in the facial esxpresison that fit the situation or emotion label Is there evidence of universal emotions? - Yes but there is evidence of nonverbal vocalisations of basic emotions **Cross-cultural similarities** Studies of natural emotion expressions - Induction of emotion states or observations of people experiencing emotion - E.g. Matsumoto and Willingham (2006) -- Olympic athletes from 35 countries - Gold and bronze medal winners= genuine smiles - Silver medal winners= sadness or contempt - No cultural differences in facial expressions - Blind and sighted athlete display same expressions - No cultural differences Emotions in music - Music induces basic emotion - Similarities between human music and emotion vocalisations in primates (Snowdon and Teie, 2013) - Dissonant pitch intervals- threat and alarm - minor intervals- sympathy or sadness - major intervals: positive lively affect - similarities observed across cultures movement and music - Sievers, Wheatley et al (2013)asked participants to animate a bouncing ball or to make music - Similar patterns of music and movement in the US and in a remote community in Cambodia Emotion experience - Scherer and Walbott (1994): cross-cultural similarity in events of emotion - Levenson et al. (1990): American ppts asked to produce facial expressions of emotion - Distinct patterns of physiological responses - Stressful discussions among east Asian and European American couples associated with similar changes in physiological responses (Tsai and Levenson, 1997) Self-reported bodily sensations - Ppts used pictures to indicate the bodily sensations they experienced when they felt certain emotions - Maps were concordant across 101 cultures Kama Muta (Seibt et al., 2017) - Positive emotion of being moved - Warmth, teary eyes, goosebumps, chills - Induced by communal closeness (hugs, reunions, imagining loved ones) - Promotes social bonds and helping - Associated with similar perceptions and bodily feelings in the US, Norway, China, Israel and Portugal Cultural and Emotion 3 Cross-cultural differences Facial expressions and vocalisations of disgust: - Cross cultural recognition of basic emotions through nonverbal emotional vocalisations (Sauter et al., 2010) Display rules (Ekman, 1962; Friesen, 1972) - Culturally prescribed rules that dictate the management and modification of the universal expressions, depending on social circumstances - Describe how emotions should be expressed - Where and when expression is appropriate - E.g. American and Japanese ppts watching stressful movies alone or with experimenter - Dependent measure = facial expression - No differences when alone - Japanese inhibit their emotion expressions in presence of the experimenter In group advantage (Elfenbein and Ambady, 2002) - Observes more accurate when they judge facial expressions of members of their own culture - Partly explained by the dialect theory of facial expressions (Elfenbein, 2013)- facial expressions differ from culture to culture similar to dialects - Different cultures may exhibit slight variations in innate expressions - Basic emotions= universal language - Variations = accents Other differences - Southerners more expressive than northerners (Pennebaker et al., 1996) - Irish more expressive than Scandinavians (Tsai and Chentsova-Dutton, 2003) - Variations in antecedents and appraisals - Imada and Ellswroth (2011): different appraisals of successes and failures in americans and Japanese **Cultural dimensions** - Cross-cultural similarities and differences in emotion expression and experience - We cannot examine all countries in the world - Cultural dimensions- value cosntructs used to describe a specific culture - Allow comparisons and clustering of cultures - Each culture can be given a value for each dimension Collectivism and Individualism (Hofstede, 1980, 2001) - Culture= software of the mind - Survey among IBM employees 1967-1973 - Framework of six cultural dimensions - Regularly updated - The extent to which people see themselves as: - Autonomous personalities (individualism) - Or - Members of communities (collectivism) - North American countries = individualistic values - East Asian and eastern European countries = collectivistic values Independent and interdependent self (Markus and Kitayama, 1991) - Different cultures have different interpretations of self and others Individualistic cultures Collectivistic cultures -------------------------- ------------------------------- Independent self-concept Interdependent self-concept Unique self Self connected to the group Personal goals Comunnal goals Express one's uniqueness Maintain connections, harmony Implications - Display rules: expression of negative emotion less desirable in collectivistic than individualistic cultures - E.g. Japanese ppts inhibit emotion expressions in presence of experimenter - E.g. Matsumoto et al. (2008) individualistic countries encourage greater expressivity - Thinking styles - Independence- analytical thinking styles- object oriented - Interdependence- holistic thinking styles- context oriented - Implications for emotion perception: observers from collectivistic cultures more influenced by emotional tone of a context than observers from individualistic cultures Ito, Masuda, and Li (2013 - Central character expresses emotion among other faces - Task: judge intensity of ahppiness or sadness - Compared to European Canadians, Japanese ppts are more influenced by context Cultural dimensions Dialectical doctrines of emotion - Dominant religious doctrines influence the experience of emotion - Daoism, Buddhism, Confucianism are major religions in East Asia - Dialectical understanding of the experience of positive and negative emotions - Good feelings and experiences connected to bad feelings and bad experiences Optimising doctrines of emotion - Dominant in Western countries - Historically value negative emotion and experience - 18^th^ century and later- cheerfulness becomes a sign of virtue - Happiness= valued emotion in western cultures Implications for emotion experience - Positive emotions universally more valued than negative emotions - The difference is more marked in Western countries - Compared to Americans, East Asians are more likely to mention negative features of happiness (Uchida and Kitayama, 2009) - East Asians also report feeling more moderate positive and negative feelings, and more often feel both (Kitayama et all., 2000; Mesquita and Karasawa, 2002) Affect Valuation Theory (Tsai et al., 2016) - Differences in how people value positive and negative emotions - Striving for ideal affect - East Asian= seeking low-arousal positive emotion (e.g. contentment) - Western= seeking high-arousal positive emotion (e.g. excitement, happiness) Honour - Self-esteem determined by own reputation of by reputation of one's family - Family members uphold reputation through avoidance of humiliation - Cultures of honour: South America, Spain, mediterranean countries - Anger and violence more acceptable in honour cultures as responses to insults to honour (Cohen et al., 1996) - Same effect for southern than northern ppts Cultural dimensions: social ecology - How natural and social habitats affect human mind and behaviour (and vice versa) - Collectivism linked with pathogen prevalence (Fincher et al., 2008) - Or with rice agriculture - Traditional use of plough predicts gender inequality (Alesina et al., 2011) - Demography matters - How do people establish and maintain relationships now and in the past? Relational mobility (Thomson et al., 2018) - Freedom and opportunity to choose interpersonal relationships based on personal preference Romantic relationships (Yamada et al., 2017) - A study of romantic passion in Japan and USA - Measures of relational mobility and passionate love - Passion associated with greater commitment in both societies - Levels of passion are higher among American than Japanese ppts - Difference partially explained by relational mobility Relational mobility= variable that represents how much freedom individuals have to choose who to form a relationship with Historical migration and emotion (Niedenthal et al., 2018) - Historical heterogeneity (diversity) positively associated with smiling, laughter, and positive emotion