HOW WE EXPRESS EMOTIONS IS ALL IMPORTANT FOR

CROSS-CULTURAL COMMUNICATION AS WELL AS

MANY OTHER PURPOSES

THE UNIVERSAL FACIAL EXPRESSION VIEW HAS BEEN DOMINANT FOR

FIFTY YEARSSAD, ANGER, FEAR, DISGUST, HAPPY, CONTEMPT AND OTHERS

ARE EVOLUTIONARILY DICTATED ADAPTIVE SURVIVAL MECHANISMS

DarwinTompkinsEkmanIzard

James Russell Marieke DeMoii

Rachel Jack THERE ARE NO DISCRETE EMOTIONS, THERE ARE

EMOTIONAL PATTERNS AND THE PATTERNING IS DIFFERENT AMONG CULTURES. E.G.

BUT THERE ARE DISSIDENTS

WHAT IS A BUSINESS PERSON OR ROBOT TO DO WHEN ABROAD?

BOTH CAMPS AGREE THERE ARE AT LEAST SOME DIFFERENCES; ALMOST 100 YEARS OF CROSS –

CULTURAL RESEARCH HAS TURNED UP SIMILARITIES AND

DIFFERENCES. WHICH ARE MORE IMPORTANT??

Experiment: Screening Passengers By Observation Technique (SPOT) at U.S. airports. Based on Universal Theory. Not one terrorist caught, lots of congressional criticism. Universal Theory looks to be premature for influencing technology.

EKMAN THINKS UNIVERSAL

This company tells us how to get along in China.

(put cursor on above, right click, and choose

“open hyperlink”)

A little premature?

SOME COMPANIES THINK IT IS THE DIFFERENCES THAT ARE MORE IMPORTANT

Walmart Had To Leave Germany

Because of Smiling Clerks! Should they

have paid more attention to differences rather than universals?

We Need To Explore The Number and Patterns of Emotional Displays in Various Cultures Even If There are Universals. It is important for Marketing, Cross-Cultural Communication, Catching Terrorists, and Programming Robots!

.

There are a number of ways of doing this but the basic paradigm is to show subjects from various

cultures photos of facial expressions and ask them to sort them. Cluster analysis and similar

techniques are applied.

NEW STUDIES FOR US TO PURSUE:

Jack et al. found that Chinese subjects living temporarily in Scotland did not identify emotion faces similarly to western subjects. Will bicultural Chinese American subjects identify emotion pictures similar to Ekman’s studies or similar to Jack et al.’s results? What is the influence of culture? Chinese American Subjects will do several tasks. They will free sort (thus eliminating advance categories) Ekman’s photos into piles. The pattern will be analyzed with multidimensional scaling (MDS). They will also make forced choice selection among Ekman’s categories. They will also be asked to give their own emotion label to the pictures. Further, they will be photographed posing Ekman’s set of emotions and any other emotion they feel is important. This is a broad based exploratory approach which includes a mix of experimental paradigms used in many past studies, and answers some criticisms of past methodologies (such as the forced choice category paradigm). Are the resulting patterns and sorts closer to Ekman’s traditional and well known results? Or closer to Jack et al.’s results (many overlapping categories). Is the MDS pattern also familiar (as in Russell’s circumplex dimensional model)? Finally, and in a simple qualitative exploration, do the Chinese Americans report during a closing interview the same categories of emotions as Ekman? Do they emphasize categories at all? Implications for cross-cultural communication will be discussed.

Affective Neuroscience The Facial Feedback Hypothesis

Interaction of Cognitive, Cultural, and Biological factors.

Are Emotions Best Thought of As Discrete or as Dimensions?

There are many other similar facets of emotions to explore: