Emotion, Psychology, and Culture - Essay Example

Many factors explain the universality of emotional expression in various cultures. These factors are expression, perception, experience, antecedents, appraisal, and concept. These factors basically shape who we are.

            Charles Darwin gave us the basis on which to discover the universality of human emotion. He suggested that facial expressions, like other behaviors, are biologically innate and evolutionary adaptive. And humans express emotions in their faces in exactly the same ways around the world regardless of culture or race. In this he was right.

            Thus, the universality of our emotions provides cultures a base form that the cultural influences can mold and shape us into who we are.

Cultural Influences

            Culture plays a major role in how we react to different situations daily. Whether these situations are social, business, with family, with friends, or with strangers; we react differently. We use cultural display rules to help guide our reactions to each and every situation that we are in. These rules are learned early in life and by adulthood, our reactions to these rules are pretty much automatic.

            Different cultures display emotions for the same situations differently. An example came from pg 231:

            “Ekman (1972) and Friesen (1972) designed a study to document the existence of these cultural display rules and their role in producing cultural differences in emotional expressions. In the study described earlier, American and Japanese subjects were asked to view highly stressful films while their facial reactions were videotaped. That experiment actually had two conditions. In the first condition, subjects viewed the stimuli by themselves. In a second condition, an older, higher-status experimenter came into the room and asked the subjects to watch the films again, with the experimenter observing them. Their facial reactions were again videotaped. Analyses showed that Americans in general continued to show negative feelings of disgust, fear, sadness, and anger.

            The Japanese, however, invariably smiled in these instances. These findings show how universal, biologically innate emotional expressions can interact with culturally defined rules of the display to produce appropriate emotional expressions. In the first condition, when display rules did not operate, the Americans and the Japanese exhibited the same expressions. In the second condition, display rules were operative, forcing the Japanese to smile in order not to offend the experimenter, despite their obvious negative feelings. These findings are especially impressive because the subjects in the second condition that produced differences were the same individuals as in the first condition that produced similarities.”

            Thus, facial expressions of emotion are under the dual influences of universal, biologically innate factors along with culturally specific learned display rules. Furthermore, when the display rules do not apply to the situations, the innate universal facial expressions tend to come forth. That explains why people can differ in their emotional expression despite the fact that our expressional base is all the same.

My Expression

            Culture has shown me that our expressions can vary. However, the value of morality that I choose to uphold allows for my general reactions to various situations to be somewhat different than other people's. I choose to go with a more Christian value base and a more professional base when I am at work. I try to be friendly to everyone that I meet. Thus, I am generally regarded as a dependable person and well-liked person.

            I feel that culture is now more degrading to a person than ever before in my life. Thus, there are times when watching anything on TV is hard to do. But, still, I manage to find things that I can watch. However, TV is a major part of our media as is the rapid use of the internet nowadays.

            As you can see, our emotions and who we are as a person are directly affected not only by our basic innate universal emotional base but the cultural influences which are around us each and every day.