Social and Cultural Influences on Emotional Expression

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Chapter 8 Motivation and Emotion
Social and Cultural Influences on
Emotional Expression
FIGURE
8.10
Elements of Ceremonial Facial
Masks That Convey Threat
Certain geometric patterns are
common to threatening masks
by
in many cultures. “Scary”
Halloween pumpkins tend to include these
patterns, too. When people in various cultures were asked which member of each
of these pairs was more threatening, they
consistently chose those, shown here on
the left, containing triangular and diagonal elements. Cover this caption, then ask
a few friends to try the same task. How
many of them chose the left-hand elements as being more threatening?
doing
2
learn
Not all basic emotional expressions are innate or universal (Ekman, 1993). Some are
learned through contact with a particular culture, and all of them, even innate expressions, are flexible enough to change as necessary in the social situations in which they
occur (Fernández-Dols & Ruiz-Belda, 1995). For example, facial expressions become
more intense and change more frequently when people are imagining social scenes as
opposed to solitary scenes (Fridlund et al., 1990). Similarly, facial expressions in
response to odors tend to be more intense when others are watching than when people are alone (Jancke & Kaufmann, 1994).
Further, although a core group of emotional responses is recognized by all cultures
(Hejmadi et al., 2000), a certain degree of cultural variation exists in recognizing some
emotions (Russell, 1995). In one study, for example, Japanese and North American
people agreed about which facial expressions signaled happiness, surprise, and sadness, but they frequently disagreed about which faces showed anger, disgust, and fear
(Matsumoto & Ekman, 1989). Members of cultures such as the Fore of New Guinea
agree even less with people in Western cultures on the labeling of facial expressions
(Russell, 1994). In addition, there are variations in the ways that cultures interpret emotions expressed by tone of voice (Mesquita & Frijda, 1992). An example is provided by
a study showing that Taiwanese participants were best at recognizing a sad tone of voice,
whereas Dutch participants were best at recognizing happy tones (Van Bezooijen, Otto, &
Heenan, 1983).
People learn how to express certain emotions in ways specified by cultural rules.
Suppose you say, “I just bought a new car,” and all your friends stick their tongues out
at you. In North America, this display probably means they are envious or resentful.
But in some regions of China, it expresses surprise.
Even smiles can vary as people learn to use them to communicate certain feelings.
Paul Ekman and his colleagues categorized seventeen types of smiles, including “false
smiles,” which fake enjoyment, and “masking smiles,” which hide unhappiness. They
called the smile that occurs with real happiness the Duchenne smile (pronounced “doSHEN”), after the French researcher who first noticed a difference between spontaneous,
happy smiles and posed smiles. A genuine, Duchenne smile includes contractions of the
muscles around the eyes (creating a distinctive wrinkling of the skin in these areas), as
well as contractions of the muscles that raise the lips and cheeks. Few people can successfully contract the muscles around the eyes during a posed smile, so this feature can
be used to distinguish “lying smiles” from genuine ones (Frank, Ekman, & Friesen, 1993).
The effects of learning are seen in a child’s growing
range of emotional expressions. Although infants begin with a set of innate emotional
responses, they soon learn to imitate facial expressions and use them to express a wide
range of emotions. In time, these expressions become more precise and personalized,
so that a particular expression conveys a clear message to anyone who knows that person well.
If facial expressions become too personalized, however, no one will know what the
expressions mean, and they will fail to bring responses from others. Operant shaping,
described in the chapter on learning, probably helps keep emotional expressions within
certain limits. If you could not see other people’s facial expressions or observe their
responses to yours, you might show fewer, or less intense, facial signs of emotion. In
Learning About Emotions
The photo on page 333 shows the wife and daughter of a U.S. Marine helicopter pilot waving goodbye as he
departs for duty in a war zone. Their emotions probably included sadness, anxiety, worry, dread, uncertainty,
hope, and perhaps anger.
335
Communicating Emotion
fact, as congenitally blind people grow older, their facial expressions tend to become
less animated (Izard, 1977).
As children grow, they learn an emotion culture—rules that govern what emotions
are appropriate in what circumstances and what emotional expressions are allowed.
These rules can vary between genders and from culture to culture (LaFrance, Hecht,
& Paluck, 2003; Matsumoto et al., 2005). For example, TV news cameras showed that
men in the U.S. military being deployed to Iraq tended to keep their emotions in
check as they said goodbye to wives, girlfriends, and parents. However, many male
soldiers in Italy—where mother-son ties are particularly strong—wailed with dismay
and wept openly as they left for duty in Kosovo. In a laboratory study, when viewing a distressing movie with a group of peers, Japanese students exerted much more
control over their facial expressions than did North American students. When they
watched the film while alone, however, the Japanese students’ faces showed the same
emotional expressions as those of the North American students (Ekman, Friesen, &
Ellsworth, 1972).
Emotion cultures also shape how people describe and categorize feelings, resulting in both similarities and differences across cultures (Russell, 1991). At least five of
the seven basic emotions listed in an ancient Chinese book called the Li Chi—joy,
anger, sadness, fear, love, disliking, and liking—are considered primary emotions by
most Western theorists. Yet although English has more than 500 emotion-related
words, some emotion words in other languages have no English meaning. The Czech
word litost apparently has no English word equivalent: “It designates a feeling that
is the synthesis of many others; grief, sympathy, remorse, and an indefinable longing. . . . Litost is a state of torment caused by a sudden insight into one’s own miserable self ” (Russell, 1991). The Japanese word ijirashii also has no English equivalent; it describes the feeling of seeing a praiseworthy person overcoming an obstacle
(Russell, 1991).
Similarly, other cultures have no equivalent for some English emotion words. Many
cultures do not see anger and sadness as different, for example. The Ilongot, a headhunting group in the Philippines, have only one word, liget, for both anger and grief
(Russell, 1991). Tahitians have different words for forty-six types of anger, but no word
for sadness and, apparently, no concept of it. One Westerner described a Tahitian man
as being sad over separation from his wife and child. The man himself said that he felt
pe’a pe’a—a general word for feeling ill, troubled, or fatigued—and did not attribute it
to the separation.
Facial expressions, tone of voice, body postures, and gestures
can do more than communicate emotion. They can also influence other people’s behavior, especially people who are not sure what to do. An inexperienced chess player, for
instance, might reach out to move the queen, catch sight of a spectator’s pained expression, and infer that another move would be better. The process of letting another person’s emotional state guide our own behavior is called social referencing (Campos,
1980). This process begins early; even three-month-old infants will look in the direction in which an adult’s eyes have moved (Hood, Willen, & Driver, 1998).
The visual-cliff studies described in the sensation and perception chapter have been
used to create an uncertain situation for infants. To reach its mother, an infant in these
experiments must cross the visual cliff. If the apparent drop-off is very small or very
large, there is no doubt about what to do. One-year-olds crawl across in the first case
and stay put in the second case. However, if the apparent drop-off is just large enough
(say, two feet) to create uncertainty, the infant relies on its mother’s facial expressions to
decide what to do. In one study, mothers were asked to make either a fearful or a joyful
face. When the mothers made a fearful face, no infant crossed the glass floor. But when
they made a joyful face, most infants crossed (Sorce et al., 1981). Here is yet another
example of the adaptive value of sending, and receiving, emotional communications.
Social Referencing
social referencing A phenomenon in
which people’s communication of emotion serves to guide another person’s
behavior in uncertain situations.
C H A P T E R C L O S I N G S TA R T