Week 2 Homework Questions

Homework Questions Week 2:

1. What does it mean to take a cultural approach to observing and understanding emotion?

It means that it is looking at more than just the individual subjects.  It involves looking at elements that differ between various boundaries and how those differences affect emotional expression.  These papers seem to focus on geographical boundaries.  In the paper written by Jankowiak and Fischer, the emotions connected to love were explored over large geographical boundaries.  The large geographical regions included North America, East Eurasia and multiple others.  The paper by Ekman and Friesen also focused on geographical boundaries.  Rather than focusing on love it is looking at people and their ability to recognize emotions.  The reason why they took a cultural approach was to see if recognizing emotions was innate or a skill that we learn from the people around us and our surrounding environment. The Elfenbein and Ambady article focuses on not only looking at different cultures but also looking within cultures.  This article uniquely looks at the differences or relationships between the emotional recognition abilities of majority and minority groups.  It also looks at the in-group advantage.  All of these articles looked at how one’s boundaries and surrounding elements shape how they express they emotions as well as how well they can recognize the emotions of other people. 

2. What cultural variations (if any) in emotion exist?

Cultural variations definitely exist in emotion.  People learn habits from others who surround them and methods of emotional expression are learned in a similar way.  For example, the paper by Elfenbein and Ambady talks about how we better understand the emotions of people from the same group as us.  People who are in the same geographical boundaries and surrounded by the same elements learn to express and interpret emotions in the same way.  This is also present in the paper written by Jankowiak and Fischer.  That paper shows that love is not present everywhere in the same way.  Even though these papers do show that cultural variations in emotion exist there are parts of emotion that are constant across borders.  The paper by Ekman and Friesen shows that some emotions are recognized in the same way across borders.  These cultural aspects of emotion do not vary due to the interaction between cultures.  We are now more than every working with people from around the world and learning from each other how to express and interpret emotions.  In some ways we are a global culture.

3. Think about last weeks readings.

a) Please highlight differences and similarities between the evolutionary, cognitive, and cultural approaches.

Most of these approaches looked at where they believed emotions come from and the order of the process that develops these emotions.  The evolutionary approach believes that these emotions were developed over time and passed down to offspring.  The cognitive approach believes that a mental process occurs that enables us to react with an emotional response.  One paper said that the mental process came first whereas another paper said that a physiological response was the emotional trigger.  Even though they differed on the process of developing emotions they contained similar if not the same elements in their approach.

b) What do all of these approaches stand on the following questions:

                1. What is an emotion? For the most part it seems that all of the articles think of emotions as a reaction.  These reactions either developed as habits and were passed down to offspring or in response to physiological or cognitive processes.

                2. What the origins of an emotion? This differs for the different authors.  Darwin thinks emotions are evolutionary.  How we feel in different situations was learned and eventually passed down to offspring.  Lazarus thinks that emotions are triggered by a cognitive process.  We interpret our well-being and then our emotion is the response.  James believes the trigger is physiological.  Our body reacts and then our emotional response follows.  Finally, Oatley believes that emotions come from assessing our plans.  We have good emotions when we are on track with our plans and negative emotions when something goes wrong.

                3. Are emotions universal? Darwin’s paper talked about this topic the most.  He was studying to see if emotional expression is universal.  He says there are some innate emotions that are but some we have developed due to our culture and surroundings that are unique.  Lazarus seemed to have a similar thought.  He said that society has a “template” by which we compare our well-being.   At the same time he said that we have unique emotions that are shaped by our motives, experiences, beliefs etc.  I believe that James also says we express emotion in unique ways because it is all based on how our body responds physiologically to the trigger. 

                4. What are the functions of emotion? Emotions help us know if our well-being is threathened.  Whether they are triggered by a cognitive process or a physiological change the emotion that comes about is what we feel that tells us if the situation is good or bad.  Darwin’s paper treats them as a part of evolution.  Emotions have played a role in survival overtime.