by Emma Herms, Indiana University
Traditionally, emotions were thought of as universal. What would it mean for an emotion to be universal? A universal emotion would be associated with a single facial expression or unique physiological response and be consistent across cultures. Researchers have explored potential universal facial expressions for emotions (e.g., Ekman & Friesen, 1971; Gendron et al., 2020), and physiological responses to emotional stimuli (e.g., heart rate, skin conductance; Cacioppo, et al., 2000; Shu et al., 2018). However, it is not possible to determine what emotion someone is experiencing based solely on their face or physiology because a wide range of facial expressions (Duran et al., 2017) and physiological responses (Cacioppo, et al., 2000; Barrett, 2006) accompany every emotion. We need to consider culture and context to make sense of a given emotional experience.
Emotion recognition paradigms have been widely used to assess whether emotions are universal. A set of facial expression images was created by having actors make exaggerated facial expressions for happiness, surprise, sadness, anger, fear, and disgust (Ekman & Friesen, 1976). The facial expressions were based on stereotypes from the United States (e.g., anger was represented by a scowl with pinched eyebrows). Participants were then presented with a facial expression image and given a list of emotion words to choose from. With this word list, participants from Western and Eastern cultures labeled the facial expression images with the ”correct” emotion word around 85% of the time (Ekman, 1971). However, participants from the United States who were not given a word list labeled the facial expression images with the “correct” emotion word less than 50% of the time (Barrett, 2017). This suggests participants were being biased by the word list and learning what label best fit the stereotyped facial expression through the emotion recognition paradigm. Importantly, when researchers used free labeling (i.e., no word list) with the Hadza people from north-central Tanzania, consistency with the assumed universal labels was low (below chance for four of six facial expression images tested; Gendron et al., 2020). There are cultural differences in expressing emotions, but this can be overlooked if our experimental paradigms are biased.
Evidence for the role of context in emotions comes from Durán and colleagues (2017) who examined the various facial expressions participants made when experiencing an emotion. They found participants made the stereotypical facial expression used in emotion recognition paradigms (e.g., smiling when happy, or scowling when angry) less than 35% of the time (Durán et al., 2017). Instead, participants made a variety of facial expressions for each emotion which could only be understood when the surrounding context was taken into consideration. For example, imagine a person crying during an award ceremony. This emotion might be interpreted as intense happiness, rather than sadness, because of context. Taking culture and context into consideration in our research paradigms will enhance our understanding of how emotions are expressed and viewed by other cultures around the world.
Despite contradictory evidence, the traditional theory that emotions are universal continues to persist. Assuming stereotypes of emotions from the United States are universal can have detrimental effects on how individuals from other cultures are treated. For example, in the United States, we expect remorseful individuals to cry. Yet not all individuals or cultures express remorse in this way. Some people may express remorse with a neutral facial expression, a response that in the United States may be interpreted as “guilty” or “unmoved.” This assumption can have real-world consequences, such as longer sentences for similar crimes (Corwin et al., 2012; MacLin et al., 2009). Given the diversity of nationalities and languages represented in clinical science and adjacent fields, we should keep an open mind when interpreting other people’s emotions, whether that be at conferences or in our own institutions. Finally, it will be important to understand the role of culture and context in other constructs we measure to better assess their validity and future application.
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References
Barrett, L. F. (2006). Solving the emotion paradox: Categorization and the experience of emotion. Personality and social psychology review, 10(1), 20-46. https://doi.org/10.1207/s15327957pspr1001_2
Barrett, L. F. (2017). How Emotions are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. https://lisafeldmanbarrett.com/books/how-emotions-are-made/
Cacioppo, J. T., Berntson, G. G., Larsen, J. T., Poehlmann, K. M., & Ito, T. A. (2000). The psychophysiology of emotion. In R. Lewis & J. M. Haviland-Jones (Eds.), The handbook of emotion (2nd ed., pp. 173–191). New York: Guilford.
Corwin, E. P., Cramer, R. J., Griffin, D. A., & Brodsky, S. L. (2012). Defendant remorse, need for affect, and juror sentencing decisions. Journal of the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law Online, 40(1), 41-49. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22396340/
Durán, J. I., Reisenzein, R., & Fernández-Dols, J. M. (2017). Coherence Between Emotions and Facial Expressions. In J. A. Russell & J. M. Fernández-Dols (Eds.), The Science of Facial Expression (pp. 107-129). Oxford Scholarship Online. https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780190613501.001.0001
Ekman, P. (1971). Universals and cultural differences in facial expressions of emotions. W: J. Cole (red.). In Nebraska Symposium on Motivation, 19, 207-283. https://1ammce38pkj41n8xkp1iocwe-wpengine.netdna-ssl.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/Universals-And-Cultural-Differences-In-Facial-Expressions-Of.pdf
Ekman, P. & Friesen, W. (1971). Constants across cultures in the face and emotion. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 17(2), 124-129. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0030377
Ekman, P., & Friesen, W. (1976). Pictures of Facial Affect. Consulting Psychologists Press. https://www.scirp.org/reference/ReferencesPapers.aspx?ReferenceID=1238187
Gendron, M., Hoemann, K., Crittenden, A. N., Mangola, S. M., Ruark, G. A., & Barrett, L. F. (2020). Emotion perception in Hadza hunter-gatherers. Scientific Reports, 10(1), 3867. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-020-60257-2
MacLin, M. K., Downs, C., MacLin, O. H., & Caspers, H. M. (2009). The effect of defendant facial expression on mock juror decision-making: The power of remorse. North American Journal of Psychology, 11(2). https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2009-08708-010
Shu, L., Xie, J., Yang, M., Li, Z., Li, Z., Liao, D., … & Yang, X. (2018). A review of emotion recognition using physiological signals. Sensors, 18(7), 2074. https://doi.org/10.3390/s18072074
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