The four articles that we read for this week’s class all deal with emotions and the impact that culture and gender have on a person’s perception of emotions. Each article presented a different way of approaching emotions analytically which only adds to the confusion of understanding one’s personal emotions. At the same time, knowing that there are many influences on how emotions are understood can help clarify one’s personal definition of emotions. I found the Semantic Satiation that Lindquist spoke about in her essay “Language and the Perception of Emotion” the interesting place to try and combine all the other theories that we read about in the other articles.
Semantic Satiation is used to manipulate certain effects on a person’s perception of emotion. The way that this happens is that an emotional word is repeated out loud three or thirty times by a person and then they judge a word or object that is either like the repeated word or not like the repeated word. Now, how would this have influenced Westerners if the emotion word had been the Japanese-culturally bound Amae? Would this satiation been able to condition Amae into Westerners so that they are able to understand what the Japanese mean when they experience the inappropriate requests from loved ones. Even while reading the article by Niiya, it was hard not to have a completely negative connotation to the experimental situations that had Amae. My independent nature was trying to overpower my understanding of Amae. In the end Americans could experience Amae without labeling the situation which is what Matsumoto was talking about.
In “Cross-Cultural Psychology in the 21st Century”, Matsumoto discusses the cultural similarities and differences in all cultures. When applying these similarities and differences to an emotion like Amae, it helps to understand why Americans could grasp the concept without being able to define the situation the same way as Japanese could. Both cultures were able to see the intensity in the situations of a close person requesting an inappropriate favor. Both Japanese and Americans could perceive the same expressive nature in the situation as well because Americans understood what part of the situation was the most important: the moment when the requestor wants the reply from the person being requested. However, there is not emotion recognition on the part of Americans because there is no word to describe that interchange emotionally in the English language.
Most interestingly for me was the short article on gender differences by Wager and Ochsner. There were so many factors in that report that affected how women and men would respond to scenes of anger. The cultural and societal requirements that have been placed on each gender could have been influencing them to respond in a specific way to the images no matter what they actually felt. People who were being tested for their emotional reaction could have been under reporting and skewing their personal feelings in order to fit the cultural stereotype. Does this mean that we’re more interested in sticking with the stereotypes that women are more emotional and men are more reserved even though these are restricting concepts? Why is it that we want to have culturally bound emotional concepts? Is it possible to create a universal, pan-cultural emotional language? How would that affect the cultures when that would require everyone to find importance in the same emotions at similar times and to utilize the same basic emotions to express themselves? If a universal emotional database is not possible, how is it possible for each culture to understand the differences between the emotions all over the world? Would this help define emotions personally? Would this help close the gender gap in emotions?
Language is how people are able to communicate shared categories to one another, according to Lindquist, and how are men and women supposed to understand each other’s emotional language? Would that help them to understand each other better? I hope that is possible. Is it important that men and women each have their own emotional language? It’s hard to read about all the differences in emotional perception and keep your own in mind. It’s even harder to remember that the way you personally perceive emotions is not how everyone in the room with you does perceive them. Is a constant reminder necessary to get to the bottom of emotional language?
3 comments:
The reading on the concept of Amae and the subsequent evaluation of it's uniqueness to Japanese culture was fascinating. I thought that Niiya, Ellsworth and Yamaguchi made a convincing case for Amae being expressed and felt in other cultures besides Japanese. Their results seem to support Tomkins basic emotions theory on the universality of emotions across cultures. In their Amae studies, the American participants experienced the qualities of Amae even though they did not have any word to describe the experience. Would the results of these studies on Amae put a wrench into the "Language and the Perception of Emotion" study? I think it might because they believe that language shapes how a person perceives emotion in another person's behavior. How would they explain Amae since it appears to contradict their conclusion?
I was very intersted in the study of Amae in Japenese and American culture. Being from a different culture myself, I have noticed differences and several times have found myself not being able to translate what I was feeling. I find the differences in understanding and perceiving emotions intriguing. Can we all feel the same emotions? Is the emphasis placed by society? And all of which this implies in our societies and cross-cultural differences. for example, how the way we feel illustrates "rules" or characteristics of our society. I also thought the sex differences question was interesting, and its link to society as well. Therefore raising the same sort of questions Laurel did.
After reading this week's articles, I was fascinated in how individual emotions are so greatly influenced by the culture from which they originate. And in response to Naomi's post, I believe that emotions absolutely have the potential to be perceived universally - after all, we are all human! - but cultural definitions of what emotions are (and which ones exist most in different parts of the world) tend to dictate how individuals ultimately define their own emotional experiences. Is it possible to change one's culturally dictated emotional map if one relocates to another part of the world? Or are the emotions we adopt in childhood what stick with us forever?
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