Nonverbal Accents: Cultural Nuances in Emotional Expression (AKA Everybody is Different)
[ knowledgeisthewing / fuckyeahethnicwomen]
Collection of different articles about Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett & Maria Gendron's new study; A new study on cultural expression, human emotion and universal expression reinforces what many followers of this blog already know; emotional behavioural universality is a westrocentric farce. Individuals read expression differently. We react differently. There are so many contingent variables: valence, autonomic nervous system responses and oxytocin stimuli, social cues, cultural context, etc. (Moi, Deena, my two cents. )
photo cred: moi, in it: escapedemotion
CAN you detect someone’s emotional state just by looking at her face?
It sure seems like it. In everyday life, you can often “read” what someone is feeling with the quickest of glances. Hundreds of scientific studies support the idea that the face is a kind of emotional beacon, clearly and universally signaling the full array of human sentiments, from fear and anger to joy and surprise. But this assumption is wrong.
If faces do not “speak for themselves,” how do we manage to “read” other people? The answer is that we don’t passively recognize emotions but actively perceive them, drawing heavily (if unwittingly) on a wide variety of contextual clues — a body position, a hand gesture, a vocalization, the social setting and so on. ( NY Times / Barrett)
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" Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett & Maria Gendron's new study study shows that facial emotional recognition isn't universal at all, and that previous studies pointing to universal expressions used methods that were highly dependent on context. In reality, a person's ability to correctly register the emotion on another's face hinges entirely on how those emotions are presented.
Barrett and Gendron's study—as well as most of the work done at Barrett's Interdisciplinary Affective Science Laboratory, which conducts ongoing research into the basis (or bases, as is more likely) of emotion —posits that the "six discrete emotion categories" idea is a cultural concept created by Westerners.
"Skeptical both of the original research methods used to prove the "universality" theory, which involved prompting subjects with emotion words and asking them to label expressions with them, Barrett and Gendron [and their team] and the University of Namibia conducted a cross-cultural experiment. Using Americans and members of the Himba ethnic group, a traditional northeast Namibian culture notable for its isolation from almost all Western cultural influence, the tram investigated whether recognition of facial expressions might instead be contextual, and whether subjects' ability to correctly label expressions might hinge entirely on cues from the experimenters.
"The ease with which this new study was able to invalidate the commonly referenced research about emotion recognition, in addition to the little-acknowledged research that preceded their study, points to chronic concerns about scientific research and how it's shared.
Not only does the acceptance that all people feel the same "basic" emotions in the same way and can detect those emotions in others' faces and voices reflect the deeply rooted, mostly unintentional bias inherent in the research models of Western science (the "six basic inherent universal emotions" just so happen to be identified by American scientists, in English, for example); more basically, it reflects the public's preference for accepting essentialist scientific ideas.
"People have a deeply held belief that anger, sadness, fear and so on are biologically basic, that they're naturally occurring, immutable categories, and scientists just haven't looked hard enough for the right brain circuit for each emotion yet," says Barrett, "instead of [considering] the idea that every instance of anger or sadness or fear has a biological basis, but there isn't a one-to- one correspondence between a facial expression and an emotion category. I think [the idea that emotions are contextual] is just too complex for people. It's not the story people are interested in."
"We have to understand that an emotion, like anger, is not a physical thing, one physical form with a physical essence," says Barrett. "It's a conceptual category, a heterogeneous population of instances…You feel lots of different angers, and your body does different things in anger; you behave different ways in anger depending on context, and science has to stop treating variability in all these different angers as if it's error, and start treating it as if it's meaningful and important." (Popular Science"
"Finally, Study 1 revealed that Himba participants fre-quently understood vocalizations in action terms (e.g., growling). Research on action-identification theory (Kozak et al., 2006) demonstrates that physical move- ments can be understood as an action or as evidence of a mental state. Emotion perception, at least in a Western cultural context, involves both action identification and mental-state inference (Spunt & Lieberman, 2012), but our results indicate that Himba participants disproportionately understood the vocalizations in action terms. This finding suggests that Himba conceptions of emotion may be based more on action than on mental feelings. Cross-cultural variability in the concept of emotion has been documented (e.g., Wierzbicka, 1999), and future research is required to explore this possibility." (Cultural Relativity in Perceiving Emotion From Vocalizations)
SUP improper referencing but referencing nonetheless:
Emotion and the Autonomic Nervous System: Introduction to the Special Section. Emotion Review April 1, 2014 6: 91-92
Gendron, M., Roberson, D., van der Vyver, J. M., & Barrett, L. F (in press). Cultural relativity in perceiving emotion from vocalizations. Psychological Science. Epub ahead of print, Feb 5, 2014.
Gendron, M., Roberson, D., van der Vyver, J. M., & Barrett, L. F (2014). Perceptions of emotion from facial expressions are not culturally universal: Evidence from a remote culture. Emotion, 14, 251-262.
Lisa Feldman Barrett, Batja Mesquita and Maria Gendron Context in Emotion Perception. Current Directions in Psychological Science. October 2011 vol. 20 no. 5 286-290. doi: 10.1177/0963721411422522
Rachael E. Jack, Roberto Caldara, Philippe G. Schyns. Internal representations reveal cultural diversity in expectations of facial expressions of emotion..Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 2011; DOI: 10.1037/a0023463
LINKS & SUMMARIES:
Face or body? Oxytocin improves perception of emotions from facial expressions in incongruent emotional body context / Facial Expressions Aren't As Universal As Scientists Have Thought | Popular Science / (MAIN:) Nonverbal Accents - Association for Psychological Science)
First, our perception can change based on environment, such as certain images or objects that are juxtaposed with an expression. For instance, a scowl could be seen as fearful when paired with a story of danger, but it could be interpreted as disgust when paired with an image of soiled underwear. Second, words play an important role as well: When people are asked to identify emotions without words alongside them, they are accurate just 58 percent of the time; when they can match expressions to words, that rate improves to 83 percent.
Our cultural backgrounds influence how we perceive emotions: Research suggests that Western cultures actually tend to focus on the eyes, nose, and mouth when observing facial expressions while East Asian cultures fixate on the eyes alone. Western cultures also see emotion as an internal, individualized state, whereas [some] East Asian cultures judge an individual’s emotion by focusing on the expressions of those around the individual and his or her relationships to others. As the researchers point out, it’s rare for us to see an isolated facial expression, and thus our perceptions shift as other information is taken into consideration." (Bernie Wong, about previous studies by Barrett)
HIMBA ABSTRACT:
"A central question in the study of human behaviour is whether certain emotions, such as anger, fear, and sadness, are recognized in nonverbal cues across cultures. We predicted and found that in a concept-free experimental task, participants from an isolated cultural context (the Himba ethnic group from northwestern Namibia) did not freely label Western vocalizations with expected emotion terms. Responses indicate that Himba participants perceived more basic affective properties of valence (positivity or negativity) and to some extent arousal (high or low activation)
In a second, concept-embedded task, we manipulated whether the target and foil on a given trial matched in both valence and arousal, neither valence nor arousal, valence only, or arousal only. Himba participants achieved above-chance accuracy only when foils differed from targets in valence only. Our results indicate that the voice can reliably convey affective meaning across cultures, but that perceptions of emotion from the voice are culturally variable." (Gendron)
EMOTIONS AND THE ANS ABSTRACT:
"In many evolutionary/functionalist theories, emotions organize the activity of the autonomic nervous system (ANS) and other physiological systems. Two kinds of patterned activity discussed: (a) coherence (i.e., emotions organize and coordinate activity within the ANS, and between the ANS and other response systems such as facial expression and subjective experience), and (b) specificity (i.e., emotions activate different patterns of ANS response for different emotions)" (Levenson) *
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