2 - Cultural Understanding of Emotions
Consider the way in which language is an artifact of culture. Speech is universal, but the language in which people speak is specific to their culture, and the manner in which they speak reflects the values and philosophy of a specific culture. There are different ways to express a thought in different language, and some languages lack the words to express thoughts that are present in other languages. The same observations can be made of cultural differences in emotion.
The Cultural Context
Western culture takes the perspective that there is something wrong with emotions in general. This goes back as far as Plato, who disdained emotion because it seemed to derive from the lower part of the mind and perverted reason. This is echoed in the work of Darwin, who regarded emotions as animalistic and primitive, a vestige of a primitive ancestry that humans would do well to evolve away from.
In common culture, emotion is disparaged as being weak or immature, a characteristic of children, women, and weak men. A person who is being "emotional" is presumed to be wrong and generally not worth paying attention to until they regain control, which is to say until they suppress their emotions.
Even so, there is some value to emotion, when they characterized as "instinct" or "intuition" or even "inspiration" that enable an individual to achieve objective results. Emotion gets some share of the credit for success but shoulders all of the blame for failure.
This is not universally true across all cultures, and there are brief periods even in western culture where the disdain for emotion was at least temporarily set aside.
Romanticism
The Romantic era in Europe was an age in which emotions were more broadly embraced. Ironically, it follows on the heels of the Enlightenment (scientific discover) and led to the Industrial Era (technology), which were both characterized by disdain for emotion.
This era is largely considered to be one of artistic and literary productivity, subjects that are often dismissed as frivolous (which may be due in part to their emotional associations), but romanticism was also highly influential in personal life, philosophy, and politics.
The notion of individual freedom, a common theme in modern politics, is an essentially emotional appeal. Freedom is preferable to slavery for no other reason than it is a pleasant manner of existence, and many human rights are only important if the happiness of each individual is the primary value of a culture.
(EN: From here the authors consider a few of the authors and philosophers of this era in a roundabout way, underscoring the point that the Romantic era was focused on emotion rather than reason.)
Cross-cultural Comparison
There are various methods of comparing culture. Obviously, we can identify similarities and differences in cultures that presently exist, but we can also look to the way in which a single culture changed over time and, in doing so, recognize the efforts in the present day that will impact our culture in future.
The difference among cultures is evident to a layman who interacts with members of a different culture. Whether he goes abroad to immerse himself in another culture or interacts with foreigners in his native land, he immediately becomes aware of differences and, if he can suppress his own ego, consider that the way that which people interact is an effect of a culture that is different to, but no less valid than, his own.
There are also broad generalizations about culture - we refer to European or American culture without acknowledging that there is no such thing: culture exists on a smaller level than the continent or the nation, and even within a single community there may be a myriad of different cultures.
The differences between "East" and "West" are very often observed, though again these are huge abstractions on a collection of cultures of China and Japan (East) and America and Western Europe (West). That understood, consider the differences between them:
The main contrast between East and West is in the nature of the self. Western cultures of the present day are highly individualistic whereas Eastern cultures are more collectivistic. The impact on self-perception and self-esteem gives rise to many cultural differences.
Consider the emotion of anger, which is very well tolerated in the West. It is not uncommon for an individual to be angry when his personal goals are thwarted by a collective need, nor is it at all uncommon for two people who like each other very much to express anger toward one another on occasion. Eastern cultures find this to be inappropriate and unfathomable.
There are other emotions present in the East and unfathomable in the West. Consider the Japanese emotion of "amae" for which there is no word in English, and whose translation is along the lines of "a feeling of satisfaction that arises from being interdependent" that embraces belonging, fulfillment of duty, and similar concepts. It is something that Westerners do not understand and are often hostile to the notions of codependence that it embodies.
While there is some argument that emotions are innate and supportive of biological function, it is clear that many emotions (or at least emotional reactions) are trained into individuals by culture. One example is an experiment performed with infants being encouraged or discouraged by their mothers to approach a toy. When encouragement is given, both Eastern and Western infants proceed at the same pace in its direction. When disapproval or anger is expressed, both groups halted - but the Western babies resumed their pursuit after 18 seconds whereas the Eastern ones took 48 seconds.
The cultural attitude toward emotion is also evident in the literature of a culture. Consider the references to fear in Western literature are almost universally negative, and cultural maxims encourage Westerners to perceive fear as an obstacle to be overcome - to suppress the natural avoidance reaction, which means to suppress and even banish fear from their panoply of emotions.
At the same time, Western culture take the view that emotions are natural and it is acceptable to express them - to show anger, elation, frustration, and so on are just as much a communication skill a vocabulary itself. In eastern cultures, particularly pronounced among the Japanese, emotions are to be restrained and any expression of emotion is a sign of weakness and irrationality.
This also expresses itself in politics: expressing one's emotions is not only acceptable, but a political right of every individual in most Western societies, whereas Eastern culture regards individual emotion to be harmful to society and expressing emotions is not only unacceptable, but in some instances punishable by law when an individual expresses emotions in public.
(EN: The author confessed that east/west was a broad approach, and while I can largely accept that I had had to restrain the urge to add notes about exceptions and contrasts - his fundamental point is well taken, and the same comparisons might be drawn between smaller groups: the differences between American and European, between French and German, between Brittany and Normandy etc.)
Emotional Climates
The term "emotional climate" describes the general mood of a group that describes not only the prevailing emotions, but the way in which those emotions influence cultural behaviors.
In developed societies there is a spirit of optimism and goodwill, among people who interact with one another in a peaceable manner, whereas in the parts of the world where people are desperate, there is a general mood of mistrust and antipathy. The emotional climate is not merely the result of circumstances, but is also the cause of them or, at the very least, the factor that keeps them on their present course.
There's an extended description of a sociologist's visit to a small island with a tribal population with a collectivistic culture, in which being compassionate to one another is held as their highest value - even to the point where the observer was counseled not to smile at a young girl who was acting out to get attention because it would encourage the girl to continue, and instead she should give the child a disapproving glare to encourage her to sit quietly and behave, as a "socially intelligent" person should do and learn instead to take pleasure in not disturbing others.
Human Universals of Emotion
If emotions are, as some suggest, derived from biology and function as motivation to perform actions required to survival, then it stands to reason that there should be certain emotions that are universal. That is, people who survive in essentially the same manner (a small farming community in America, Japan, Ghana, and Italy all perform the same basic activities) should have essentially the same emotions.
Yet there are strong divisions in the academic community that gravitate toward the extremes of considering that emotions are universal, though they may be expressed differently in different cultures, or the opposite view which suggest that emotions are relative to culture, and that similarities or generalizations are coincidental.
Returning to the sociologist in a primitive society, the author notes that she was able to recognize emotions in a culture very different to her own ,and that the villagers were able to recognize hers. In essence, an emotion such as sadness seems to be expressed in similar ways across various cultures, but it is brought about by very different means.
As such the authors find that there is some merit in the argument of both camps - there are significant differences among cultures, but also a greater number of similarities in emotional expression.
Cultural Differences in Elicitors
Some emotions are clearly universal: fear in the face of a sudden and imminent threat does not vary by culture, nor do traits such as attachment of mothers to their children.
More subtle emotions such as jealousy are not witnessed in every culture. It is well known in monogamous societies, where being part of a mated pair is essential to child-rearing, the prospect of losing one's partner to another suitor arouses strong emotion, whereas in societies in which child-rearing is done communally, the loss of a mate is less of a threat (and there seems little point in having commitment). In other instances, the possessiveness is on the tribal level, such that the members of the tribe are casually polyamorous but a great commotion arises if a member of the tribe couples with an outsider.
Thus considered the emotion of jealousy is an effect of biology in that it is the response to a threat to the social structure - but the manner in which the social structure is perceived causes the emotion to be elicited by differing causes.
Thus far there have been few systematic comparisons in the way that emotions are elicited across many cultures. The authors cite a few studies that compare specific cultures, particularly an experiment in which Malay and American participants were asked to describe various situations that would cause a given emotion to arise and, when the responses of both groups were interpreted by a third (Hawaiians, who live in a location roughly halfway between the two), which was able to correctly identify 65.8% of American and 68.9% of Malaysian responses. It's also noted there was a pronounced difference in their ability to match situations to the emotions of fear and happiness (80%) versus their performance in matching anger (53%).
Display Rules
In terms of the display of emotions, theory holds that certain emotions are likened to biological reflexes, and should be universal, whereas others are social conventions that are learned behaviors.
One study observed 25 American and 25 Japanese subjects' reaction to a series of films of highly unpleasant surgical procedures (nasal surgery, circumcision, and the like), with some scenes from an unremarkable canoe trip as a baseline.
In the first phase of the experiment, in which subjects watched the films while observed by a camera, they made similar facial expressions of fear and disgust, but in the third phase they watched the film while being directly observed (by an observer who sat beside the screen, facing the audience) it was noted that the Japanese masked their expressions. The third phase was also filmed, and when reviewing the footage in slow-motion microexpressions of disgust and fear began to form, but subjects suppressed them.
A separate study observed the members of a tribal culture that had such strong disdain for emotion that anyone who expressed any emotion but fear or shyness that anyone who displayed emotion would be physically punished. The result was a society in which people are entirely unexpressive when interacting with one another, rarely using gestures and maintain an expressionless visage when speaking among themselves.
The Social Function of Emotions
The third category of cross-cultural distinctiveness is that of cultural construction: that emotions are cultural products similar to languages or works of art, contrived as media of communication among the members of a given society.
The author refers back to the original study of the communal islanders, in which "fago" was an invented term that referred to an emotion of contentedness in accommodating others. This emotion is largely unknown in individualistic cultures and children are taught to experience it as part of their upbringing - per the example of the girl, adults express disgust when children act to call attention to themselves and approval when they sit quietly and refrain from causing a disturbance - and as such a positive emotion becomes associated to the behavior.
The author suggests that cultural derivation of emotions is often difficult to assess to a satisfactory degree, particularly given that in many societies little conscious thought is given to emotion, and even those that are culturally derive are regarded as natural. As such the method even to begin such an analysis in a manner that would yield relevant results across multiple cultures remains insufficiently defined.
Passionate Love
The authors consider the emotions surrounding sexual attraction as an example of the way in which cultural differences become evident. In the West, sexual attraction is often lumped into the vague emotion of "love" which also is used for non-sexual attraction to things as well as to people.
Passionate love is rooted in the biological urge to reproduce with a partner who is attractive because they have qualities that are valued, some of which are biologically linked to reproduction but others of which are culturally derived.
(EN: Consider the way in which body shape is commonly deemed to be attractive. Present-day concepts of attractiveness seek a shape that is rail-thin and practically emaciated, which is contrary to healthiness and survival, whereas the most attractive mates of a few generations ago were more full-bodied and curvaceous, more closely linked to a healthy physique that could survive stress and privation.)
As such, the biological urges that resulting in attraction are the same across cultures, even down to brain chemistry (the increased level of phenylalanine that results in a sense of desire and pain), but the emotion is greatly differentiated by the triggers that evoke this reaction and the manner in which it is expressed in behavior.
Falling in Love
The author shares an "anthropological report" of a man and woman who boarded a train as strangers and interrupted their journey a few days later to be married. The authors claim the story represents a Western idea, but does not indicate which ideal it represents (one can guess it's the notion of "love at first sight"). Used as the basis of a survey, roughly equal numbers of respondents claimed that their own history was similar or not at all similar.
In collectivist society, individuals do not choose whom they marry and the creation of a couple is often done with great deliberation by other parties: the tribal council or the elder of two families arrange for two people to become a couple. In such cultures the notion of passionate love is largely unknown or treated as a subversion of an individual's duty to his family.
(EN: Even in the west, where we have the notion that people choose their own mates, the pairing is not entirely free, as families often make arrangements to put young people together and pressure them to couple if it does not occur naturally. Much of social ritual in the West involves an indirect attempt to ensure that children are properly paired - a debutante ball is where wealthy people attempt to ensure their children marry into their own class, and the permission of parents is still sought and in some locations required by law for a marriage to take place.)
Courtly Love
It has been suggested that the Western perspective on love originated in Medieval Europe, in the atmosphere of feudalism. The concept of "courtly" love forms the basis of courtship, derived from the way in which gentlemen of noble status pursued a mate.
This was characterized by the higher virtues of devotion and admiration, with sexual impulses being considered knavish and base. In particular, a gentleman would fall in love with a lady and become her knight, without any sexual involvement. In that sense, courtly love was love of the court itself - the noble women of a powerful house - and often stripped of sexual expectations (a knight could love a lady of the court even though both were married to others). To "love" a woman above one's station, with constant and unsatisfied yearning, was a point of honor.
It is also averred that courtly love was an aristocratic ideal seldom practiced, but given the notion was popular for several hundred years, as evidenced by both literature and correspondence of the era, it certainly had an influence on actual practices.
The ideal of courtly love is fraught with contradictions: love occurred outside of marriage and was never consummated, the knight had to struggle to maintain christian values in the fact of temptation, the knight would court a woman above his station but on their marriage would become her master, and so on.
(EN: The author doesn't mention this, but much of this occurs during a time of cultural change in Europe, where newly-adopted christian values that are male-dominant and individualistic struggled for dominance with the pre-christian values of pagan Europe that were female-dominant and colelctivistic. Many of these seeming contradictions make perfect sense when considered from that perspective.)
The values of medieval love are common to many cultures of Europe and were carried across the Atlantic to America, but are largely unknown in other cultures where the status of women was never very high and acquiring a wife is a transaction similar to acquiring livestock - a functional means to achieve a higher desire to have children.
Love as a Transitional Social Role
Another body of theory views love as a transitional role in which a man and woman make the transition from being individuals or members of separate families to that of being a couple within their society - with cohabitation, economic interdependence, and the duties of raising children.
In societies in which a mate is freely chosen, love precedes marriage, and falling in love is done before committing to the new role. In societies where the choice of mate is made outside of the couple, love follows marriage as a method of settling into a role that has been forced upon the couple by others.
That is not to say the two are exclusive, as love may occur on both sides of the marriage event - a couple who felt passionate love that drew them together must then learn a different kind of love, more in the nature of contentment, after the coupling has occurred.