Psychology Emotion Expression, Culture, Happiness & Review
To view other notes of Psychology Click Here.
Expression of Emotion
People express emotions not only through speech but also through nonverbal behavior, or body language. Nonverbal behavior includes facial expressions, postures, and gestures.
The Basic Emotions
The psychologist Paul Ekman and his colleagues have identified six basic emotions: happiness, sadness, anger, fear, surprise, and disgust. Worldwide, most people can identify the facial expressions that correspond to these emotions.
The Catharsis Hypothesis
The catharsis hypothesis suggests that anger can be decreased by releasing it through aggressive actions or fantasies. However, although catharsis helps in some cases, researchers have generally found that catharsis does not decrease anger in the long term. In fact, aggressive actions or fantasies can sometimes increase anger.
The Facial-Feedback Hypothesis
Some researchers have proposed that the brain uses feedback from facial muscles to recognize emotions that are being experienced. This idea is known as the facial-feedback hypothesis. It follows from this hypothesis that making the facial expression corresponding to a particular emotion can make a person feel that emotion. Studies have shown that this phenomenon does indeed occur.
For example, if people smile and try to look happy, they will feel happiness to some degree.
Gender Differences
Some research suggests that the genders differ in how much emotion they express. In North America, women appear to display more emotion than men. Anger is an exception—men tend to express anger more than women, particularly toward strangers.
This gender difference in expressiveness is not absolute. It depends on gender roles, cultural norms, and context:
- For both men and women, having a nontraditional gender role leads to increased emotional expressiveness.
- In some cultures, women and men are equally expressive.
- In some contexts, men and women do not differ in expressiveness. For example, neither men nor women are likely to express anger toward someone more powerful than themselves.
Emotion and Culture
Some aspects of emotion are universal to all cultures, while other aspects differ across cultures.
Similarities Among Cultures
Ekman and his colleagues have found that people in different cultures can identify the six basic emotions: happiness, sadness, anger, fear, surprise, and disgust. The physiological indicators of emotion are similar in people from different cultures.
Facial Expressions Are Innate
Both people who can see and people who have been blind since birth have similar facial expressions of emotions. This observation suggests that facial expressions are innate, since blind people could not have learned these expressions by observing others.
Differences Among Cultures
Although many emotions and expressions of emotions are universal, some differences exist among cultures:
- Categories of emotions: People in different cultures categorize emotions differently. Some languages have labels for emotions that are not labeled in other languages.
Example: Tahitians do not have a word for sadness. Germans have a word, schadenfreude, indicating joy at someone else’s misfortune, that has no equivalent in English.
- Prioritization of emotions: Different cultures consider different emotions to be primary.
Example: Shame is considered a key emotion in some non-Western cultures, but it is less likely to be considered a primary emotion in many Western cultures.
- Different emotions evoked: The same situation may evoke different emotions in different cultures.
Example: A pork chop served for dinner might evoke disgust in the majority of people in Saudi Arabia, while it’s likely to provoke happiness in many people in the United States.
- Differences in nonverbal expressions: Nonverbal expressions of emotion differ across cultures, due partly to the fact that different cultures have different display rules. Display rules are norms that tell people whether, which, how, and when emotions should be displayed.
Example: In the United States, male friends usually do not embrace and kiss each other as a form of greeting. Such behavior would make most American men uncomfortable or even angry. In many European countries, however, acquaintances normally embrace and kiss each other on both cheeks, and avoiding this greeting would seem unfriendly.
- Power of cultural norms: Cultural norms determine how and when to show emotions that are not actually felt. Acting out an emotion that is not felt is called emotion work.
Example: In some cultures, it is appropriate for people who attend a funeral to show extreme grief. In others, it is appropriate to appear stoic.
Happiness
Happiness is a basic human emotion, but people often make assumptions about happiness that empirical research does not support. For example, people often assume that most people feel unhappy and dissatisfied with their lives, but research shows this is not true. Most people describe themselves as fairly happy even if they are in less than ideal circumstances. Surprisingly, researchers have not found a consistent positive correlation between happiness and factors such as wealth, age, intelligence, physical attractiveness, or parenthood—factors that many people commonly associate with happiness.
Although circumstances do not reliably predict happiness, some circumstances do correlate with increased happiness. These include having a good social network, being married, having a satisfying job, and having strong religious convictions. These circumstances, however, are only correlated with happiness. As explained on page 10, correlation does not necessarily mean causation. Research also shows that happiness tends to depend on people’s expectations of life and on how people compare themselves to their peers.
Subjective Well-being
Rather than focusing only on negative reactions to unfavorable circumstances, researchers today have begun to study subjective well-being. Subjective well-being is the perception people have about their happiness and satisfaction with life. Subjective well-being depends more on attitudes to external circumstances than on the circumstances themselves. That is, factors such as wealth or employment don’t matter as much as how we feel about our wealth or employment.
Quick Review
Theories of Emotion
- Emotion is a complex, subjective experience that is accompanied by biological and behavioral changes.
- Charles Darwin proposed that emotional expressions are hard-wired and that emotions evolved because they had adaptive value.
- Current evolutionary theorists believe that emotions are innate.
- The James-Lange theory states that people experience emotion because they perceive their bodies’ physiological responses to external events.
- The Cannon-Bard theory states that the experience of emotion and the accompanying physiological arousal happen at the same time.
- Schachter and Singer’stwo-factor theory states that people’s experience of emotion depends on physiological arousal and the cognitive interpretation of that arousal.
- People’s experience of emotion depends on how they evaluate their environment.
The Biological Bases of Emotion
- Emotion involves activation of the brain and the autonomic nervous system.
- Information about emotion-evoking events moves along two pathways in the brain.
- The pathway that goes to the amygdala allows people to respond rapidly to events.
- The pathway that goes to the cortex allows people to appraise events more slowly.
- Researchers use autonomic responses to measure emotion.
- The polygraph, or lie detector, is a device that detects changes in autonomic arousal. It is often inaccurate in determining whether or not a person is lying.
- Different emotions differ in pattern of brain activation, neurotransmitters released, and autonomic nervous system activity.
Expression of Emotion
- People worldwide can identify six primary emotions: happiness, sadness, anger, fear, surprise, and disgust.
- The facial-feedback hypothesis states that the brain uses feedback from facial muscles to recognize emotions that are being experienced.
- The two genders express different amounts of emotion. This difference depends on gender roles, culture, and context.
Emotion and Culture
- People in different cultures can identify six basic emotions.
- There are universal physiological indicators of emotion.
- People in different cultures categorize emotions differently.
- Different cultures consider different emotions to be primary.
- The same situation may evoke different emotions in different cultures.
- Nonverbal expressions of emotion differ across cultures.
- Cultural norms determine how and when to display emotions that are not actually felt.
Happiness
- Subjective well-being depends more on attitudes toward circumstances than on the circumstances themselves.
- Circumstances such as social support, marriage, job satisfaction, and religiosity are positively correlated with happiness.
- Happiness tends to depend on people’s expectations of life and on the way they compare themselves to others.
