Cultural Differences in Emotion Recognition and Expression Assignment Paper

Cultural Differences in Emotion Recognition and Expression Assignment Paper Cultural Differences in Emotion Recognition and Expression Assignment Paper The breadth of emotions that our eyes are able to express is truly far-reaching. From joy to longing, from anger to fear, from sadness to disgust – eyes can become powerful windows to our internal states. We use our eyes to take in the world around us, and to reflect the world within us. To reveal our inner emotional states with our facial expressions and to interpret them accurately is one of the foundations of social interaction.Whether emotion is universal or social is a recurrent issue in the history of emotion study among psychologists. Some researchers view emotion as a universal construct, and that a large part of emotional experience is biologically based. However, emotion is not only biologically determined, but is also influenced by the environment. Therefore, cultural differences exist in some aspects of emotions, one such important aspect of emotion being emotional arousal level. All affective states are systematically represented as two bipolar dimensions, valence and arousal. Arousal level of actual and ideal emotions has consistently been found to have cross-cultural differences. In Western or individualist culture, high arousal emotions are valued and promoted more than low arousal emotions. Moreover, Westerners experience high arousal emotions more than low arousal emotions. By contrast, in Eastern or collectivist culture, low arousal emotions are valued more than high arousal emotions. Moreover, people in the East actually experience and prefer to experience low arousal emotions more than high arousal emotions. Mechanism of these cross-cultural differences and implications are also discussed.Cultural Differences in Emotion Recognition and Expression Assignment Paper Permalink: https://nursingpaperessays.com/ cultural-differe…assignment-paper / We investigated the influence of contextual expressions on emotion recognition accuracy and gaze patterns among American and Chinese participants. We expected Chinese participants would be more influenced by, and attend more to, contextual information than Americans. Consistent with our hypothesis, Americans were more accurate than Chinese participants at recognizing emotions embedded in the context of other emotional expressions. Eye tracking data suggest that, for some emotions, Americans attended more to the target faces and made more gaze transitions to the target face than Chinese. For all emotions except anger and disgust, Americans appeared to use more of a contrasting strategy where each face was individually contrasted with the target face, compared with Chinese who used less of a contrasting strategy. Both cultures were influenced by contextual information, although the benefit of contextual information depended upon the perceptual dissimilarity of the contextual emotions to the target emotion and the gaze pattern employed during the recognition task.Culture is a huge factor in determining whether we look someone in the eye or the kisser to interpret facial expressions, according to a new study. For instance, in Japan, people tend to look to the eyes for emotional cues, whereas Americans tend to look to the mouth, says researcher Masaki Yuki, a behavioral scientist at Hokkaido University in Japan. This could be because the Japanese, when in the presence of others, try to suppress their emotions more than Americans do, he said. In any case, the eyes are more difficult to control than the mouth, he said, so they probably provide better clues about a person’s emotional state even if he or she is trying to hide it. Clues from emoticons As a child growing up in Japan, Yuki was fascinated by pictures of American celebrities. “Their smiles looked strange to me,” Yuki told LiveScience. “They opened their mouths too widely, and raised the corners of their mouths in an exaggerated way.” Japanese people tend to shy away from overt displays of emotion, and rarely smile or frown with their mouths, Yuki explained, because the Japanese culture tends to emphasize conformity, humbleness and emotional suppression, traits that are thought to promote better relationships. Cultural Differences in Emotion Recognition and Expression Assignment Paper So when Yuki entered graduate school and began communicating with American scholars over e-mail, he was often confused by their use of emoticons such as smiley faces ?? and sad faces, or :(. “It took some time before I finally understood that they were faces,” he wrote in an e-mail. In Japan, emoticons tend to emphasize the eyes, such as the happy face (^_^) and the sad face (;_;). “After seeing the difference between American and Japanese emoticons, it dawned on me that the faces looked exactly like typical American and Japanese smiles,” he said. Photo research Intrigued, Yuki decided to study this phenomenon. First, he and his colleagues asked groups of American and Japanese students to rate how happy or sad various computer-generated emoticons seemed to them. As Yuki predicted, the Japanese gave more weight to the emoticons’ eyes when gauging emotions, whereas Americans gave more weight to the mouth. For example, the American subjects rated smiling emoticons with sad-looking eyes as happier than the Japanese subjects did. It is important to understand the differences between young and older adults in emotional states and reaction. Many of the theoretical models studying emotional experience across adulthood predict changes throughout this life stage. A growing number of studies find that, as we age, the way we understand, manage, and react to positive and negative events changes. Different theoretical models have been proposed to explain this phenomenon: (a) Socioemotional Selectivity Theory; (b) Strength And Vulnerability Integration; and (c) Dynamic integration theory. One of the most widely espoused theories in recent years is the Socioemotional Selectivity Theory (SST). The SST maintains that time horizons play a key role in motivation (Carstensen, 2006). The future time perspective considers that when the subjective sense of time and its limits changes, our motivational priorities also shift. The theory differentiates two broad categories of goals: one concerning the goals which help us acquire knowledge of the world, and another related to the goals that help us achieve emotional well-being. As people age, they increasingly perceive time as finite. This perception leads older people to prioritize behaviors or goals from which they derive emotional meaning, while younger people prioritize goals related to knowledge acquisition. For example, Hess and his colleagues have shown that older adults, compared to young adults, weighted negative information related to morality more than information regarding competences when judging strangers and rating their likability (Hess, 2005; Leclerc and Hess, 2007). The SST holds that this tendency is even more striking when the categories of goals compete. Moreover, the differences in emotional reactivity do not only manifest in negative emotional states. A recent meta-analysis of 100 independent studies found a reliable positivity effect with older adults showing a positive bias overall and the younger age group showing a negative bias overall (Reed et al., 2014). The “positivity effect” refers to the tendency of older people to prioritize achieving emotional gratification. SST directly connects thinking about a limited future with the emergence of the positivity effect. In short, young adults focused their attention and better remembered negative information while older adults attended to and better remembered positive information (Kennedy et al., 2004). Clearly, individual differences exist. Life events and individuals’ management of such variables may positively or negatively impact on the emergence of the positivity effect (Scheibe and Carstensen, 2010).Cultural Differences in Emotion Recognition and Expression Assignment Paper While emotions and feelings are quite different, we all use the words interchangeably to more or less explain the same thing – how something or someone makes us feel. However, it’s better to think of emotions and feelings as closely related, but distinct instances – basically, they’re two sides of the same coin. It’s no secret that boys and girls are different— very different. The differences between genders, however, extend beyond what the eye can see. Research reveals major distinguishers between male and female brains. Scientists generally study four primary areas of difference in male and female brains: processing, chemistry, structure, and activity. The differences between male and female brains in these areas show up all over the world, but scientists also have discovered exceptions to every so-called genderrule. You may know some boys who are very sensitive, immensely talkative about feelings, and just generally don’t seem to fit the “boy” way of doing things. As with all gender differences, no one way of doing things is better or worse. The differences listed below are simply generalized differences in typical brain functioning, and it is important to remember that all differences have advantages and disadvantages. Processing Male brains utilize nearly seven times more gray matter for activity while female brains utilize nearly ten times more white matter . What does this mean? Gray matter areas of the brain are localized. They are information- and action-processing centers in specific splotches in a specific area of the brain. This can translate to a kind of tunnel vision when they are doing something. Once they are deeply engaged in a task or game, they may not demonstrate much sensitivity to other people or their surroundings. White matter is the networking grid that connects the brain’s gray matter and other processing centers with one another. This profound brain-processing difference is probably one reason you may have noticed that girls tend to more quickly transition between tasks than boys do. The gray-white matter difference may explain why, in adulthood, females are great multi-taskers, while men excel in highly task-focused projects. Chemistry Male and female brains process the same neurochemicals but to different degrees and through gender-specific body-brain connections. Some dominant neurochemicals are serotonin , which, among other things, helps us sit still; testosterone , our sex and aggression chemical; estrogen , a female growth and reproductive chemical; and oxytocin , a bonding-relationship chemical. In part, because of differences in processing these chemicals, males on average tend to be less inclined to sit still for as long as females and tend to be more physically impulsive and aggressive. Additionally, males process less of the bonding chemical oxytocin than females. Overall, a major takeaway of chemistry differences is to realize that our boys at times need different strategies for stress release than our girls. The Basel researchers designed an experiment to determine whether women perform better on memory tests than men because of the way that they process emotional information. The researchers exposed 3,400 test participants to images of emotional content, finding that women rated these images as more emotionally stimulating than men, particularly in the case of negative images. When presented with emotionally neutral imagery, however, the men and women responded similarly.Cultural Differences in Emotion Recognition and Expression Assignment Paper After being exposed to the images, the participants completed a memory test. The female participants were able to recall significantly more of the images than their male counterparts. The women had a particularly enhanced ability to recall the positive images. The study’s lead author, Dr. Annette Milnik, explained, “This would suggest that gender-dependent differences in emotional processing and memory are due to different mechanisms.” Then, fMRI data from 700 participants suggested that womens’ stronger reactivity to negative emotional images is linked with increased activity of motor regions of the brain. Previous studies have suggested that women display heightened facial and motor reactions to negative emotional stimuli. “In our study, we see a similar pattern with the fMRI data,” Milnik said in an email to The Huffington Post. “One possible explanation would be that women might be better prepared to physically react to negative stimuli than males. Another explanation would be from normative expectations, with women being expected to be more emotional, and also to express more emotions.” Here is how they differ. What are emotions? Imagine this: You sprint through the airport, on the run to catch your flight. While you try to make your way through the crowd of people waiting in line at the security check, you spot an old friend you haven’t seen in ages. Before you can say anything, you tear up overwhelmed with excitement (and forget about the rush) while you give your friend a firm hug. Emotions are lower level responses occurring in the subcortical regions of the brain (amygdala, which is part of the limbic system) and the neocortex (ventromedial prefrontal cortices, which deal with conscious thoughts, reasoning, and decision making). Those responses create biochemical and electrical reactions in the body that alter its physical state – technically speaking, emotions are neurological reactions to an emotional stimulus. Strength and Vulnerability Integration (SAVI) is a model associating age-related declines or physiological vulnerabilities with an increase in emotion-regulation strategies (Charles and Luong, 2013). SAVI suggests that in adulthood the functioning of the hypothalamicpituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis and the cardiovascular system diminishes. Activation of these two systems correlates highly with the perception of threat in humans and other species and thus impaired functioning might impact on a subjective decline in negative emotional states. SAVI posits that older adults have self-knowledge about their limited horizon. Then, they are motivated to positive experiences and also the accumulated emotional experience could help them to regulate their emotions. This theory also differentiates between avoidable and unavoidable negative experiences (Charles, 2010). Although elderly are usually oriented and motivated to quickly extricate themselves from negative situations, when negative experiences are highly stressful and inevitable, older adults’ recovery is poorer and presents more serious consequences (Charles and Luong, 2013; Piazza et al., 2013).Cultural Differences in Emotion Recognition and Expression Assignment Paper Dynamic Integration Theory (DIT) relates the decline in cognitive resources to increased vulnerability in situations involving high arousal (Labouvie-Vief, 2003) and a number of studies defend this view. Keil and Freund (2009) showed that in young adults both pleasantness and unpleasantness increased with high emotional arousal, whereas in older adults, low-arousing stimuli were those experienced as most pleasant. Advances in research and the continued interest in understanding how the emotional system functions in both aging adults and other life stages or life circumstances have generated the development of different Mood Induction Procedures (MIPs). These MIPs can be used to induce positive and negative emotions in a laboratory. Of all the methods implemented thus far, the presentation of film clips with affective content is currently one of the most effective and widely used MIPs (Gerrard-Hesse et al., 1994; Westermann et al., 1996). Film emotion induction is popular for various reasons: (a) simple standardization; (b) high ecological validity; (c) effectiveness in generating responses in the psychophysiological, motor and cognitive systems; (d) capacity to sustain an emotion at both subjective and physiological level for a reasonable time (Carvalho et al., 2012; Jenkins and Andrewes, 2012); and (e) facility to generate discrete emotions (Schaefer et al., 2010). Emotion induction by film clips is especially effective in eliciting negative emotions (Gerrard-Hesse et al., 1994; Westermann et al., 1996; Fernández-Aguilar et al., unpublished). In the literature, there are various published catalogs of film clips for use in research requiring elicitation of different emotions. As emotional targets, these catalogs have examined basic emotions such as anger, fear, disgust, sadness and amusement (Philippot, 1993). Some sets of clips have also included emotions such as surprise and satisfaction (Gross and Levenson, 1995; Rottenberg et al., 2007); tenderness (Schaefer et al., 2010); happiness and mixed emotions (Jenkins and Andrewes, 2012; Samson et al., 2016; Gilman et al., 2017). Other mood induction procedures have worked successfully to assess emotional reactivity in older adults. For example, the Italian version of the Affective Norms for English Words (ANEW) worked successfully in both healthy aging individuals and Alzheimer’s Dementia patients (Mammarella et al., 2017; Di Domenico et al., 2016). However, given the large body of work on film clips as an emotion induction procedure, it is striking that only a few studies have examined the effect of this technique in aging research, and with inconsistent results. Beaudreau et al. (2009) studied the emotional reactions in older adults using the set compiled by Gross and Levenson (1995). They found that older adults reported more anger and less amusement compared to younger adults. The findings of Jenkins and Andrewes (2012) were more generalized. They found that older adults reported higher emotional intensity in response to positive and negative stimuli, especially for clips eliciting fear and amusement. The study by Fajula et al. (2013)revealed similar data but only in the case of negative emotions. Using the set compiled by Philippot (1993), they found that older adults reported higher intensity in the four primary negative emotions (fear, anger, disgust, and sadness) and that young adults reported higher intensity on joy and happiness.Cultural Differences in Emotion Recognition and Expression Assignment Paper Furthermore, there is a surprising lack of studies on emotion induction addressing other positive emotions apart from the global category of happiness. Attachment-related emotions such as love or tenderness are not usually included. In fact, to date, they have been included in only one database of film clips (Schaefer et al., 2010). Attachment emotions play a significant role in biological, emotional and social development and thus stimuli related to these emotions should be utilized in research on aging. Moreover, different aging models propose a positivity effect whereby older adults are motivated by emotion regulation strategies that maintain positive affective states and by enhanced emotional regulation to recover from negative affect states (Reed et al., 2014). Older adults have been found to favor positive information over negative information in memory and attention (Mather and Carstensen, 2005). The ambiguity of the previous results motivated us to examine differences in young and older adults as regards their emotional responses when using film clips as the mood induction procedure. This may broaden our knowledge of the characteristics of emotional responses in older adults and how these are explained by models of aging. It also provides the possibility to identify differences between young and older adults in both baseline state and processes of emotional recovery. Our focus on the baseline state draws on the use of neutral stimuli in a wide range of studies on MIPs. As well as using emotional target stimuli, they also include neutral stimuli in their film sets. Neutral stimuli are used as they enable each participant’s’ baseline data to be obtained before starting the experimentation and also because they facilitate emotional recovery following the induction of intense emotions. The literature recommends using stimuli free on any type of emotional content and with idiosyncratic characteristics similar to those of the stimuli to be used in the selected MIP (Hewig et al., 2005; Rottenberg et al., 2007). Furthermore, the use of neutral stimuli may help obtain a precise measure of the induction capacity of a specific MIP, considering intraindividually the differences between the state of the participants during exposure to the neutral stimuli and the emotional target stimuli. The main purpose of this work is to expand our knowledge about fluctuations in positive and negative emotions in older adults when using film clips as a MIP. We compare emotional responses between young and older adults and study the differences between positive and negative induction. To this end, we used clips previously validated in a population of young Spanish adults (see Fernández et al., 2011), the majority of which were elaborated by Schaefer et al. (2010). The following hypotheses were considered: (1) negative mood induction will be more effective compared to positive mood induction both in young and older adults; (2) young and older adults will respond differently to the different negative emotional states induced; (3) young and older adults will respond differently to the different positive emotional states induced; (4) arousal levels will be higher in young adults compared to older adults; (5) baseline state is different in young and older adults and will determine the strength of negative and positive mood induction; and (6) emotion regulation after mood induction will be easier for older adults compared to young adults.Cultural Differences in Emotion Recognition and Expression Assignment Paper Participants The final sample comprised 140 volunteers aged between 18 and 84 years ( M = 39.02, SD = 25.32, 68.83% women). From the initial sample, 4 older adults and 7 young adults were excluded due to depressive symptoms. The participants were recruited from a research volunteer pool at the Department of Psychology at the University of Castilla- La Mancha (UCLM) Medical School, from an association at the Universidad de Mayores (a university program for older adults) and two socio-cultural centers in the city of Albacete. Participants were divided into age groups to form a younger group of 83 participants aged 18–26 ( M = 18.87, SD = 1.63, 69.9% women) and an older group of 57 participants aged 60–84 years ( M = 69.74, SD = 6.56, 68.4% women). Participants were receiving no psychotropic treatment or drug use and had no previous history of psychological, psychiatric or neurological disorder, according to the criteria of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders Fifth Edition (DSM-V). They presented no auditory or visual impairments other than requiring corrective lenses. All were of Caucasian ethnicity and native Spanish speakers. They gave voluntary consent to take part in the study without obtaining any type of remuneration and according to the requirements of the approved ethics procedure of the Clinical Research Ethics Committee of the Albacete University Hospital. Measures Diagnostic Evaluation As depressive symptomatology may affect emotional response, we administered the Beck Depression Inventory II (BDI-II) (Beck et al., 1961) prior to the experiment. The BDI-II is a self-report questionnaire that assesses symptoms of depression including anhedonia, sadness, loss of interest or energy, disturbances in eating and sleeping, loss of concentration or suicidal ideation. On the BDI, scores between 10 and 15 are considered in a dysphoric range and scores of 16 or above represent a depressed range (Kendall et al., 1987). Subjects scoring over 16 were excluded from our study. In the case of the older adults, the Mini Mental State Examination (MMSE) (Folstein et al., 1975) was used to discard cognitive impairment. MMSE is a screening tool measuring symptoms of dementia such as disorientation, alterations in memory, and alterations in the capacity for abstraction or in language. On the MMSE, scores between 9 and 11 are considered in the dementia range, scores between 12 and 24 indicate cognitive impairment, and scores between 24 and 26 suggest suspicion of pathology. Subjects scoring lower than 27 were excluded from our study. Both the BDI-II and the MMSE were administered in a paper-and-pencil version.Cultural Differences in Emotion Recognition and Expression Assignment Paper The Positive and Negative Affect Schedule- state version (PANAS; Watson et al., 1988) was used to assess positive affect (e.g., interested, excited, proud) and negative affect (e.g., distressed, ashamed, upset) through 20 items with answers ranged between 0 (“not at all”) and 4 (“extremely”). This questionnaire was administered telematically just before starting the experimental session and to assess prior mood before the emotion elicitation procedure. Measurement of Emotional Response The subjective emotional response was evaluated using dimensional measures. The Self-Assessment Manikins (SAM) (Bradley and Lang, 1994) is a self-report questionnaire that assesses emotional response, measuring affective valence, arousal and dominance or emotional control. Considering the dimensional structure of affect (Russell and Barrett, 1999), we administered the items measuring valence and arousal. These two dimensions are those most commonly used in the literature (Russell, 1980; Watson et al., 1988) and, furthermore, permit comparison with somato-physiological measures. Thus, participants rated, on a 9-point Likert-type scale, how pleasant/happy/amused (9) or unpleasant/unhappy/sad (1) and how aroused (9) or relaxed (1) they felt while watching the emotional video clips. The questionnaire uses graphic figures which represent the different emotional states and is therefore rapid and simple to administer in both age groups, regardless of participants’ educational level. Procedure We selected 54 scenes from HD films dubbed in Spanish with an average length of 2?38? (see Table 1). These fragments were among those in a battery of audiovisual stimuli validated in a population of young Spanish adults (see Fernández et al., 2011). The selected excerpts maintained the same features used in previous studies (Rottenberg et al., 2007; Schaefer et al., 2010). Furthermore, we added a scene from the film 127 h (Colson et al., 2010) to the disgust category, which presented the characteristics of stimuli used for disgust in previous studies. In accordance with the previously published film clip batteries, each segment was expected to induce an emotion from a specific category: amusement, tenderness, anger, sadness, disgust, fear and neutral state. Philosophical and psychological theory has traditionally focused on intra-individual processes that are entailed in emotions. Recently sociologists, cultural anthropologists, and also social psychologists have drawn attention to the interpersonal nature of emotions. In this chapter we focus on the influence of others on emotional experiences and expressions. We summarise research on social context effects which shows that both emotional expression and experience are affected by the presence and expressiveness of other people. These effects are most straightforward for positive emotions, which are enhanced in the company of others. In the case of negative emotions, the effects of social context depend on the circumstances in which the emotion is elicited, and on the role of other persons in this situation. We discuss these social context effects in the light of a more general theoretical framework of social appraisal processes. In the last post, we focused on the idea that a thought comes before an emotion. So once we’ve had that all important thought, and we end up feeling something, what are the forces out there that control how we express those feelings?Cultural Differences in Emotion Recognition and Expression Assignment Paper Culture Expressions of emotion can differ and mean different things depending on the cultural context. Stereotype alert here – the British stiff upper lip might seem a bit cold here in North America, the way Canadians like to point out their own faults could be seen as a sign of weakness in the US, the lavish outpouring of emotion at an Italian family gathering might seem overwhelming to a Japanese family. Gender Women are more likely to show vulnerability than men. Men are generally less shy about revealing their strengths than women. Women often score higher in tests aimed at measuring how well a person can identify and name the emotions of others than men. Naturally, all of these statements refer to men and women as a group. No one is trying to say every woman or every man is like this, but overall group statistics based on gender can tell us some useful things. Social conventions – at least in North America Sometimes society tell us – hold it – those emotions are not acceptable – none of that, thank you kindly. Men shouldn’t cry in public (unless they are athletes being trading from their team or retiring), women shouldn’t be angry, you don’t tell your life story to the barista at Starbucks when he asks how you’re doing. Society also gives us the message that only positive feelings are acceptable, and not even too much of that, please. If you’ve lost a loved one you do get a period of grief, but life is for the living, you’re meant to get over it, or barring that, don’t talk about it. Social roles Your social role can determine how and what types of emotion you can express, where you can do that expressing, and with whom. The boss doesn’t take an employee aside and talk about a nagging spouse (or at least he or she shouldn’t). The leader of a country doesn’t get on TV and collapse in tears due to feeling overwhelmed with the roles of the office. Emotional contagion Have you ever been to a funeral where you felt in control of your emotions and then you see another person start sobbing and you fall apart? The transfer of emotion from one person to another can affect emotional expression. We can also find that certain people wind up our emotions and others make us feel all mellow yellow.Cultural Differences in Emotion Recognition and Expression Assignment Paper Fear of self-disclosure We often limit our emotional expression because giving away too much to others can be risky. It makes us vulnerable. We might be misunderstood, or maybe we’ll make people uncomfortable, or maybe our emotional honesty will be used against us. So – what’s the point Saying What Matters lady? We’re working at getting to know more about ourselves and our emotional expression so we can get out in the world and say what matters. Being aware of some of the forces that operate behind the scenes when it comes to expressing our emotions is helpful as we pursue this goal. Then he and his colleagues manipulated photographs of real faces to control the degree to which the eyes and the mouth were happy, sad or neutral. Again, the researchers found that Japanese subjects judged expressions based more on the eyes than the Americans, who looked to the mouth. Interestingly, however, both the Americans and Japanese tended to rate faces with so-called “happy” eyes as neutral or sad. This could be because the muscles that are flexed around the eyes in genuine smiles are also quite active in sadness, said James Coan, a psychologist at the University of Virginia who was not involved in the research. Japanese Communication Is the person in front of me right now angry or happy? This may sound like an obvious question, but in fact it is not always as easy to judge as it may seem. It is very likely that the smiling face of an innocent child really does show that they are happy, but your subordinate at work who approaches you with a smile may actually be feeling very angry. Japan has long been regarded as a society where people read the atmosphere . As social animals, we humans live together for better or worse by reading the atmosphere as well as each other’s feelings, to a greater or lesser extent, in order to maintain good relations with each other. The act of guessing how another person is feeling is one part of reading the atmosphere . How then, do we read people and understand how they are feeling? One source of information for doing so is language. However, most of us have had the experience of someone responding to an email by saying, “fine, understood,” which causes you to wonder whe