PSY3500 Blogs
Variation of Emotion
Researchers focused on looking at culture tend to investigate the universality of emotion however
due to the cultural differences there have been several issues. Most trouble stems from defining
what emotion is as whole from the feelings, brain states and behaviours associated to such, some
researchers define emotion through a universal set like Ekman (1990) who defined it through the
"basic 6", those being fear, anger, disgust, joy, and surprise. However, at one point this 6 was 7, but
contempt was removed from the list. These emotions were defined as the basic ones due to the
studies performed using facial expressions showing these specific emotions. These were shown to
various groups of people from a western group of people to groups of indigenous people, from
which it was shown that these facial expressions were recognised within all the groups showing a
degree of universality to emotion.
Despite this there is still issues that crop up within this idea from the cross cultural perspective such
as unanswered questions such as "to what extent are these emotions are the same?" and "how
much does culture affect the felt emotions". Another thing that is an issue specifically from the
previously mentioned study is that of the language of a culture and how that affects how emotion is
shown and or experienced. Language is a key part to any culture and holds great significance so if
each language treats emotion differently it could be assumed that individuals from said culture
experience it differently to someone not a part of it. With regards to the "6 basic" emotions, there is
no word for disgust in Polish, equally there is no word for emotion in Tibetan either, so this does
bring to question how universal emotion is just on a definition and naming stand point.
If someone if from a culture with no wording for specific feeling is it possible for someone outside
such culture to experience the feeling named by the other culture? This can be answered by looking
at cultures that exhibit words and phrases like this such as Germany. The German language has
Variation of Emotion
Researchers focused on looking at culture tend to investigate the universality of emotion however
due to the cultural differences there have been several issues. Most trouble stems from defining
what emotion is as whole from the feelings, brain states and behaviours associated to such, some
researchers define emotion through a universal set like Ekman (1990) who defined it through the
"basic 6", those being fear, anger, disgust, joy, and surprise. However, at one point this 6 was 7, but
contempt was removed from the list. These emotions were defined as the basic ones due to the
studies performed using facial expressions showing these specific emotions. These were shown to
various groups of people from a western group of people to groups of indigenous people, from
which it was shown that these facial expressions were recognised within all the groups showing a
degree of universality to emotion.
Despite this there is still issues that crop up within this idea from the cross cultural perspective such
as unanswered questions such as "to what extent are these emotions are the same?" and "how
much does culture affect the felt emotions". Another thing that is an issue specifically from the
previously mentioned study is that of the language of a culture and how that affects how emotion is
shown and or experienced. Language is a key part to any culture and holds great significance so if
each language treats emotion differently it could be assumed that individuals from said culture
experience it differently to someone not a part of it. With regards to the "6 basic" emotions, there is
no word for disgust in Polish, equally there is no word for emotion in Tibetan either, so this does
bring to question how universal emotion is just on a definition and naming stand point.
If someone if from a culture with no wording for specific feeling is it possible for someone outside
such culture to experience the feeling named by the other culture? This can be answered by looking
at cultures that exhibit words and phrases like this such as Germany. The German language has
