Are Emotions Cross-Culturally Intersubjective? A Japanese Test.

1. Are Emotions Cross-Culturally Intersubjective? A Japanese Test. Herm Smith - UM-St. Louis Shuuichirou Ike - Teikyo University For copy of paper, email: hwsmith@umsl.edu

2. Two general approaches: Ekman’s FAST (Facial Affect Scoring Test) of primary emotions Factor analytic studies of larger sets of complex emotions after Russell (1980)

3. FAST supposes: short list of biologically innate and universal primary emotions High intersubjective ratings cross-culturally usually includes seven: happiness, anger, contempt, disgust, fear, sadness and surprise; maybe an eighth: shame

4. FAST Anger example: Japan See http://www.umsl.edu/~hsmith/Classes/Soc160/Soc160NegEmote.html for other FAST stimuli.

5. Early Factor analysis results: Emotions have two bipolar dimensions: (1) evaluation (pleasure-displeasure); (2) activity (aroused-sleepy) Circumplex structure Redundant potency information (high collinearity with Evaluation dimension)

6. Russell criticized: Many non-emotions (e.g., sleep-related) among stimuli not accepted as true emotions (see Clore & Ortony) Possible poor translations of emotion words for Japanese & other languages

7. Mackinnon & Keating, 1989; Morgan & Heise, 1989: Suggest possible 3-dimensional structure (EPA) Partial disconfirmation of circumplexity for American and Canadian emotions (by M and K)

8. Major Issues How many emotional dimensions? Is potency dimension redundant? Is structure of emotions circumplex?

9. Measuring Evaluation Dimension

10. Measuring Potency Dimension

11. Measuring Arousal Dimension

12. Redundancy Issue - Japan Missing Emotion? Conclusion: Potency information is not redundant of Evaluation.

13. The Circumplex Issue - Japan Conclusion: The circumplex model does not fit the data.

14. A 3-Dimension Model Five clear primary emotion families appear

15. Toward a Theory of Emotions • The majority of emotions words are dark and unpleasant for all humans. • Dark emotions cluster into three families. • The primary distinguisher of dark emotions is arousal. From most to least relative arousing are families centered on anger, then fear, then sadness. • The secondary distinguisher of dark emotions is potency, with the order from most potent to most impotent being anger, sadness and fear families.

16. Toward a Theory of Emotions II • A smaller set of emotion words cluster into a happiness family that is high in pleasure, potency and arousal, and a contentment family that is relatively slightly pleasant, potent and arousing. • The remaining universal (primary) emotions appear to fit within specific emotion families. Contempt and disgust are normally part of the anger family, surprise an element of the happiness family, and shame becomes differentiated as an element of the fear cluster.

17. Toward a Theory of Emotions III • Women express larger variations in emotion words signifying fear; men have larger numbers words signifying anger and sadness. • Women express larger variations in happiness-related words, and men in security-related words.

18. Toward a Theory of Emotions IV • The expression of any of the emotions in the anger family by East Asians is likely to have a much more deleterious effects on interpersonal relationships, net of stronger Asian motivation to maintain group harmony and interpersonal relationships. • This may be part of the reason why Asian women as members of the weaker sex find it necessary to categorize typically anger-related words into fear and sorrow families. • Japanese men and women appear to live in much less emotionally intersubjective worlds than do North Americans.

19. Size of Cultural Differences: • Japanese-American cultural differences have a median of 2.4 times (with quartile hinges of 1.3 and 3.9 times) that of gender differences on the evaluation dimension. • For potency, Japanese-American differences average two times larger than gender differences with quartile hinges of 1.4 and 3.5. • Arousal scale differences between Americans and Japanese are larger still; 3.2 times larger than intra-cultural gender differences, with hinges of 1.4 and 6.3.