The role of culture in emotional reactions.

As we have noted cultural and biological influences on emotions are but two sides of the same coin. All humans have an undeniable evolutionary link demonstrating our common heritage that is further supported in the separate evolution of language and socioculture. This chapter has also demonstrated a biological foundation in the universal basic emotions and its several components. As Averill (1980) stated biological and cultural theories are not really incompatible since they represent different aspects of the same emotional and behavioral phenomena. In Averill’s view emotions are socially constructed transitory roles determined by what is acceptable in a given culture. From this perspective similar events may have culturally dependent meanings since the antecedents that produce emotions are interpreted by language and cognition.

Objective comparison between cultures are difficult because emotion labels that are at times not easily translated from one language to another. Some languages have a number of words for an emotional domain that is represented by a single label in the English language. Cultures that have many emotion labels can produce finer discriminations and therefore more complex emotion meanings. The presence of many emotion labels may also reflect the salience of the emotion in the culture. The people of Tahiti evidently don’t have a word for sadness (Levy, 1984) so perhaps that is a less salient emotion in their culture. Labels that are important to emotional descriptions in some societies appear missing in other cultures (Russell, 1991). When labels are absent or present that difference can reflect the relative salience of the relevant emotion in the cultural discourse.

While there are some emotional labels or words missing in some societies there are also universal emotion terms present in all cultures (Wierzbicka, 1999). Overall there is support for emotion universals, but also for the influence of culture as mediated by language. For example all languages have a word for “feel” according to Wierzbicka that can be described in terms of good or bad. Likewise all cultures, as we have seen, have facial expressions that can also be linked with emotions described as good or bad. However, while the presence of universals cannot be denied, we must remember that the descriptive labels of emotions are formed through cultural discourse and may be an indicator of the cultural salience of that emotion. For Wierzbicka human emotions are not inherent, but constructed through the use of language and cognition. Markus and Kitayma (1994a) suggested that each culture has key cultural concepts and ideology used in the socialization of children that determine self-conceptions and worldviews. These central ideas affect the experiencing and display of emotions.

Date: 2015-01-11; view: 907