Do you think that emotions are influenced by culture and give its example?
On May 6, 2015, Stanford psychology professor and Bing parent Jeanne Tsai, PhD, presented her research on happiness before a packed East Room in this year’s Bing Distinguished Lecture. Turns out, universal happiness is not as simple as clapping your hands. Show Tsai is director of the Stanford Culture and Emotion Lab and has been fascinated by questions of culture and psychology from her own days as a happy-go-lucky Stanford undergrad. In the engaging style that has won her student popularity and teaching awards, she delivered a thought-provoking, entertaining lecture on how culture influences how we view happiness. The research she presented, some of which was done here at Bing, gave these insights into the nature of human happiness:
At first, Tsai found little empirical evidence but plentiful anecdotal reports and literary examples of cultural difference in emotion. “People often experience a disconnect when trying to interact with a person from a different culture,” Tsai points out. Anthropological studies have also described this cultural difference in emotions, with ethnographic studies indicating that emotions might be purely cultural constructions. Some even implied that emotions are impossible to understand from another cultural perspective. But while these studies richly described the emotional differences between cultures in specific contexts, they did little to explain them. This job called for psychology’s tool kit. So how to reconcile the difference between the ethnographical evidence of cultural emotional difference and the psychological results showing that we are basically feeling the same inside? The answer might be that they are describing two different aspects of emotion. The anthropological studies might describe what people ideally want to feel (their ideal affect), while the psychological results might reveal what they actually feel, or actual affect. Tsai’s subsequent research attempts to refine what we actually mean by “happiness” in what she calls affect valuation theory. Tsai began changing the questions she asked, interviewing European-American, Asian-American and Hong Kong Chinese college students about what emotional state they would ideally like to have. Most of the responses fell into two categories: European-American college student: “I just want to be happy. Normally for me that means I would be doing something exciting. I just want to be entertained. … I just like excitement.” Hong Kong Chinese college student: “My ideal state is to be quiet, serene, happy and positive.” Maybe ideal happiness does not mean the same thing to everyone after all. Tsai et al. began developing a more nuanced emotional graph, plotting ideal feelings along two axes: positive (happy, content) and negative (sad, lonely), high arousal (active, impassioned) and low arousal (passive, dull) emotional states. This grid provides a tool to measure and compare emotions across cultures. In short, everybody wants to be happy, but the specific state associated with happiness differs, and it seems to be heavily influenced by the cultural environment. Both European-Americans and East Asians valued positive emotional states, but European-Americans largely preferred high arousal positive states like excitement, elation and euphoria while East Asians largely reported a preference for low arousal positive states like peace, relaxation and calm. Asian-Americans fell somewhere in between. “Americans have to say they’re doing GREAT!” Tsai points out, “If you are only fine, people think you’re depressed. You have to be very excited about your life.” But even if people across cultures aspire to different ideal emotional states, on average, everybody reports they want to feel more positive than they actually feel.
That said, within those specific target populations, Tsai reports that European-Americans show a marked preference for excited faces, while East Asians, and Asian-Americans to a lesser degree, generally prefer the calmer faces. In her search for more empirical evidence to support this theory that culture influences ideal affect, Tsai compared everything from ads in women’s magazines to Facebook profiles and photos of successful CEOs, politicians and other public figures. The researchers measured and coded facial expressions for levels of excitement or calm, and they found that profile photos generally project the ideal affect of their culture. European-American photos featured broad smiles of people jumping off cliffs or doing other exciting stunts, while Asian and Asian-American selfies showed relatively calmer expressions and activities. These cultural messages are reinforced by advertising and product marketing, reflecting the dominant culture’s ideal affect. Ads targeting American markets emphasize energy, excitement and promise a more pumped-up existence. Tsai showed examples of everything from baby play gyms covered with bells and whistles to Kellogg’s ads for seniors encouraging active living. (“Living well and feeling great! Regular exercise and staying active support a healthy lifestyle, keep you energized, fit, and feeling great. See back for some exciting products!!”) Ads in Asian magazines promise serenity and peace, with soothing colors, expressions and images. Tsai acknowledges that Americans can value calm at times and East Asians can value excitement, but the difference is in degree. Yoga has become a popular American pastime, but more often than not it becomes power yoga. Hong Kong theme parks have roller coasters, but on the periphery and with no long lines. Which one would you rather be?
The same results came back when children were given an example of excited water play and calm water play and asked to choose what they would like to do: Even correcting for the temperament of individual subjects, European-American children preferred the splashing and jumping, Taiwanese liked the idea of floating in the pool, while Asian-Americans fell in between. Tsai then compared the bestselling U.S. storybooks of 2005, including Where the Wild Things Are, to the Taiwanese bestselling storybooks, including The Story of February. Coding the emotions expressed by the characters in the books based on excited or calm facial expression, the widths of the smiles relative to the size of the faces, and activity arousal on a scale from 1 to 3, the researchers found that the characters in the U.S. storybooks exhibited bigger, more excited smiles and engaged in more highly arousing activities than those in the Taiwanese storybooks. The current Bing study, in which children of different backgrounds are shown excited, calm and neutral faces, shows that ideal affect is acquired very early and can affect choices. Children who wanted to have the excited face themselves wanted to sit with a child that matched that emotion, while children who wanted to have the calm face also wanted to sit next to a calm child. Other findings suggest that a child’s ideal affect can change depending on exposure to cultural messages. Children who heard an exciting story chose the excited face and vice versa. Tsai suggests that chronic exposure to different cultural messages can change one’s ideal affect. Culture’s influence on our thoughts and desires is largely invisible. Therefore, when we are acting according to our culturally programmed preferences, this can have a huge impact on our choices, our behavior and even the way we perceive others. It affects what we choose to buy, the kind of vacations we take or who we sit next to in the cafeteria. This is not a problem if everyone is coming from same cultural context, but it becomes a problem in multicultural societies: There is always the possibility we might be reading people the wrong way. The implications are profound. We choose a doctor based on how well the physician matches our ideal affect, not just on their medical qualifications. Doctors, being human, also subconsciously respond to patients depending on how well the patient fits the doctor’s ideal affect. Preliminary studies suggest that a physician might pay more attention to a patient that matches their ideal affect, even ordering more tests. The same dynamic probably applies to teachers and students, bosses and employees. People are humans, and humans like people who match their ideal. Cultural differences in ideal affect can seep into the assessment and treatment of depression. Asians and Asian-Americans are less likely to seek mental health treatment, but when they do, they often run into a cultural mismatch with European-American clinicians, who are likely to view depression as an absence of high-arousal positive feelings. How does culture affect influence our emotions?However, culture also influences emotion in various ways. Culture constrains how emotions are felt and expressed in a given cultural context. It shapes the ways people should feel in certain situations and the ways people should express their emotions.
What are emotions give 3 examples?They include sadness, happiness, fear, anger, surprise and disgust.. Sadness. An emotional state characterized by feelings of disappointment, grief or hopelessness. ... . Happiness. A pleasant emotional state that elicits feelings of joy, contentment and satisfaction. ... . Fear. ... . Anger. ... . Surprise. ... . Disgust.. In what ways can emotions be influenced by culture brainly?Culture plays a major role in defining, displaying, perceiving, and experiencing a person's emotions. Each culture provides specific structure, rules, guidelines and expectations which are reflected in a person's emotions.
How does culture influence perception give an example?Give an example of how culture influences perception.
For example, animals are group with animals. However, in Eastern cultures people may group items based on associations. Such as an animal being group with grass because the animal requires grass to live.
|