EMOTIONS IN GENDER, CULTURE AND DIFFERENT AGES
INTRODUCTION
Emotion, being a very broad concept, it can be studied in various different aspects. The aspects have a very wide range right from emotions being connected to cognition till emotions being connected to social settings.
Emotions generally refer to a complex psychological state that involves three distinct components: a subjective experience, a physiological response, and a behavioural or expressive response (Hockenbury and Hockenbury, 2007). In addition to understanding exactly what emotions are, researchers have also tried to identify and classify the different types of emotions. In 1972, psychologist Paul Eckman suggested that there are six basic emotions that are universal throughout
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The physiological response:
Many of the physiological responses that we experience during an emotional state are controlled by the sympathetic nervous system which is a branch of autonomous nervous system. The autonomic nervous system controls involuntary body responses. The sympathetic nervous system is charged with controlling the body’s fight or flight reactions. When facing a threat or a danger, these responses automatically prepare the body to flee from the danger or face the threat.
The most recent research has targeted the brain’s role in the expression and experiences of emotion. Brain scans have shown that the amygdala, a part of the limbic system, plays a vital role in emotion and fear in particular. The amygdala, is a tiny, almond shaped structure that is linked to motivational states, memory and as well as emotion. Researchers have used brain imaging to show that when people are shown threatening images, the amygdala becomes activated. Damage to the amygdala has also been shown to impair the fear response.
Emotions versus moods:
In everyday life, people often use the terms ‘emotions’ and ‘moods’ interchangeably. But the psychologists actually make distinctions between these two. An emotion is normally a quite short-lived, but intense. A mood on the other hand is usually much milder than an emotion, but long-lasting. In many cases it can be difficult to identify the specific cause of a
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Darwin’s thesis, summarized in The Expression of Emotion in Man and Animals, suggested that emotions and their expressions had evolved across species, were evolutionarily adaptive, biologically innate, and universal across all human and even non-human primates. According to Darwin (1872/1998), humans, regardless of race or culture, possess the ability to express emotions in exactly the same ways, primarily through their faces. It was not until the mid-1960s when psychologist Sylvan Tomkins, a pioneer in modern studies of human emotion, joined forces independently with Paul Ekman and Carroll Izard to conduct the first of the “universality studies.” Collectively, these findings demonstrated the existence of six universal expressions- anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, and surprise- as judges from around the world agreed on what emotion was portrayed in the faces. Likewise, the emotions portrayed in the universal facial expressions correspond to emotion taxonomies in different languages around the world. There is also cross-cultural similarity in the physiological responses to emotion when these facial expressions are used as markers, in both the autonomic nervous system and brain activity. In addition, there is universality in the antecedents that bring about emotion (Scherer, 1997a, 1997b). Ekman and Friesen (1969) coined the term ‘cultural display rules’ to account for
Perceiving Emotions- the first step in understanding emotions is to accurately perceive them. This involves understanding nonverbal signals such as body language and facial expression.
Ekman, P. (2009). Darwin's Contributions to Our Understanding of Emotional Expressions.Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society.
The Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience examines an article on the amygdala response to fear faces and the way it is different between one’s own culture and other cultures. The amygdala is specialized in detecting threat and includes fearful facial expressions. The researchers of this study hypothesized that amygdala response is greater in individuals of their own culture. This study was conducted on both native Japanese participants and Caucasians in the United States. Functional brain imaging was acquired at two neuro-imaging facilities. Japanese participants were scanned at the National Institute for Physiological Sciences in Okazaki, Japan. Caucasian participants were scanned at the Athinoula A. Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging in Charlestown, MA.
Several studies have been conducted to study different aspects of fear and the amygdala. A team of researchers from New York University wanted to discover what makes screams so frightening. The team collected over a dozen scream samples from volunteers and
The focus of this literature review is on the patterns of amygdala activation and its role in attentional threat assessment, as well the effects of the neuropeptide oxytocin on the amygdala. The amygdala plays an important role in human threat assessment. In both humans and primates, the identification of facial expressions and their direction of gaze is a necessary aspect of social behavior, and the amygdala plays a large role in this function (Boll, Gamer, Kalisch, & Buchel, 2011, p. 299). From a medical standpoint, the study of the amygdala would help in understanding the neurological basis of many behavior disorders such as borderline personality disorder and post traumatic stress disorder. These studies make use of novel techniques with a combination of functional MRI and eye tracking based face perception tasks. More recent studies have involved more precise imaging in order to observe specific regions of the amygdala, rather than the amygdala as a whole structure. The amygdala is strongly influenced by fearful and angry faces, which stimulate feelings of threat. The amygdala also exhibits differential activation in different sexes, thus having extensive implications on tailoring drugs for mood disorders in the different sexes (Lischke et al., 2012, p. 1432).
Emotions – Emotions are a way for us to be able to communicate our emotional state and feelings with others. Sometimes this is through our moods or even facial
Emotions are (in part) for survival, and the more complex the emotion, the more complex the system to process it must be (both in theory and in context). If an emotion or mood is as simple as fight or flight, then this is something that is instilled in reptiles, mammals, and humans alike. These emotions are more easily figured out in the human brain, and seem to be easier to experiment with as well as find out about. There has been a large amount of research on the amygdala and fight or flight response, which as was stated above, is a basic emotion that reptiles, mammals, and humans all seem to have alike. The mor...
One famous pioneer in this area is Ekman (1973 in Shiraev & Levy, 2007, 2004) who classified six basic facial expressions as being universal and reflecting most emotional states. They are happy, sad, anger, disgust, surprised and fearful. Ekman (1973) proposed that the universality of emotions allows individuals to empathise with others and enables us to read other’s feelings therefore emotions must serve an adaptive purpose hence supporting the claim that they are universal (Darwin, 1972 in John, Ype, Poortinga, Marshall & Pierre 2002). Moreover, emotions are widely accepted to accompany...
Plutchik, Robert (1980), Emotion: Theory, research, and experience: Vol. 1. Theories of emotion, 1, New York: Academic
3). By drawing on more advanced biological knowledge of the brain’s activities in different areas, Storbeck and Clore (2007) concluded that the visual cortex could actually identify subliminal stimuli (which is regarded as a kind of cognitive activities) without its being consciously aware of by the subject. The only difference between a conscious and unconscious cognitive processing, they argued, was the strength of firing of the neurons which determined whether such information entered the subject’s consciousness, and leading to a more confident identification of the stimuli. Hence an unconscious processing doesn’t rule out cognitive activities and implies a preferential processing of affective components. Furthermore, they argued that amygdala was not the essential part in the mere exposure effect by citing the case of a patient GY whose amygdala has been severed from his visual cortex (Greve & Bauer, 1990) yet who was still shown to have the mere exposure effect. Therefore, they concluded that emotion and cognition should be treated as interdependent faculties functioning alongside with each other. This advocate was supported by a later meta-analytical review of the brain basis of emotion (Lindquist, Wager, Kober, Bliss-Moreau, & Barrett,
The sympathethic nervouse system and the parasympathetic nervous system. The sympathethic nervous system of the body acts to control the bodly functions like heart rate, urination, digestion and sexual arousal. The parasympathetic nervous system controls the fight or flight responses during difficult or stressful times. This system triggers the body to fight off any stress or danger. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autonomic_nervous_system)
Emotion is the “feeling” aspect of consciousness that includes physical, behavioral, and subjective (cognitive) elements. Emotion also contains three elements which are physical arousal, a certain behavior that can reveal outer feelings and inner feelings. One key part in the brain, the amygdala which is located within the limbic system on each side of the brain, plays a key role in emotional processing which causes emotions such as fear and pleasure to be involved with the human facial expressions.The common-sense theory of emotion states that an emotion is experienced first, leading to a physical reaction and then to a behavioral reaction.The James-Lange theory states that a stimulus creates a physiological response that then leads to the labeling of the emotion. The Cannon-Bard theory states that the physiological reaction and the emotion both use the thalamus to send sensory information to both the cortex of the brain and the organs of the sympathetic nervous system. The facial feedback hypothesis states that facial expressions provide feedback to the brain about the emotion being expressed on the face, increasing all the emotions. In Schachter and Singer’s cognitive arousal theory, also known as the two-factor theory, states both the physiological arousal and the actual arousal must occur before the emotion itself is experienced, based on cues from the environment. Lastly, in the cognitive-mediational theory
“Some emotional experience is an interpretation and not merely given by our physiological state” (Hutchison, 2015, p.127). Dan shows that his personality is biased against sadness, which could be caused by something that has happened in his earlier years. Hutchison (2015) states, “Dan interprets sadness as a way to regain energy and to reevaluate his needs, which also signals other to provide Dan with support” (p.129). However, with the cultural difference many did not know what Dan’s interpretation of sadness was because his fellow classmates have a different meaning of sadness. So, physiological theory shows within different cultures, each emotion are organized around many different affective
Perceiving emotions accurately is the first step to understanding them. In most cases, the ability to decipher body language and non-verbal communication is key. The second step is reasoning with emotions. This requires an individual to use emotions to promote thinking processes and cognitive ability. Our emotions help d...
Have you ever wondered why people have certain reactions? I chose chapter eight on emotions for my reflection paper because emotions are something that everyone has and feels, yet cannot always explain or react to in the way you would expect. Personally, I have never been great at responding to emotions in a way that I would not regret in the future. Thus, naturally being drawn to this chapter as a way to expand my knowledge on how to react to things more positively. I also wanted to learn why I feel a certain way after events that would not affect most people and be reassured about my feelings. Opposite to that, it is nice to see that, while not always productive, others have the same reaction habits. Overall, emotions are a complicated