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Lecture 3: Emotions, Motivation and Acculturation Stress
Emotions
Started with Darwin: Emotions and emotional expressions are universal; everyone has the same. Later there was discovered by Ekman & Friesen that there were six basic emotions: happiness, surprise, sadness, disgust, fear and anger.
How did they do the research: They asked different people, who have never met, how they would express certain sentences. These were checked with different societies.
Assessing universality: in particular, pride has been proposed to be universally recognized expression. Pride is different in that it involves much of the body, not just the face: erect posture, head tilted back, slight smile, arms extending away. Even people who are born blind, show this emotion.
What is an emotion: face, posture, subjective feeling, caused by the environment, combination of physiological reaction and cognitive,
Perspectives on emotions
- James-Lange Theory of Emotion: there is some kind of stimulus--> physical reaction from your body, cannot prevent it from happening --> emotion
- Stimulus/situation --> response --> subjective feeling
- This theory states that if there is no physiological response, there is no emotion.
- Two-Factor Theory of Emotions: Response can also be because of something else. Two different situations can lead to the same response. The interpretation makes it the emotion. Emotions are interpretations of our physiological responses. How do you attribute it? (Zie bb voor model)
Universality vs cultural variability
The JL theory predicts that emotions should be universal due to physiological similarities of all humans. If JL was right, then emotions would be universal, the same in every human being.
The Two-Factor theory predicts that emotions should vary across cultures because different cultural experiences may lead us to have different interpretations of physiological responses. If the Two-factor theory was right and it would depend on how you would interpret it, then not universal.
Do differences in emotional expressions affect emotional experiences, too?
Do people experience emotions the same? Is there a link with how emotions are expressed and how they are felt? If that is true, then you could either feel the emotion and express it and express the emotion and feel it. If the second thing is the case, then you could influence how you feel.
Facial feedback hypothesis provides one reason to expect cultural variability. The hypothesis proposes that we use our facial expression to infer our emotional state. This suggests that by making a particular emotional expression, we can think that we are experiencing the corresponding emotion. Pencil test: it suggests that our facial expressions can affect our emotional experience. This means that people who express their emotions more intensely could feel different. So: if our culture had rules regarding the intensity of our expressions (display rules), they may also affect the intensity of our emotional experiences.
Display rules dictate the intensity of expressions, when an expression is appropriate (norms learned early in life), what is accepted. Emotions are recognized correctly more often in someone from the same culture. People's brains show a greater response when seeing p.e. a fear expression on the face of someone from the same culture.
What is accepted in a culture differs a lot between individualistic cultures and collectivistic cultures.
Individualistic cultures --> the individual --> p.e. European-Canadians physiological response report feeling intense anger slow recovery of increased blood pressure.
Collectivistic cultures --> the harmony of the group --> p.e. Asian-Canadians physiological response report feeling less anger, quick recovery of increased blood pressure.
Either they experience less anger, or they report less anger or they have effective strategies (have learned better in their culture) to minimize their anger.
Expressing emotions: Physical is the same, reported intensity is the same, but how it looks is different. It appears that our bodies react the same way, culture doesn't play a role.
Life satisfaction and happiness
Cultural differences in subjective well-being can be affected by several factors:
- Wealth
- Human rights and equality
- Definition of life satisfaction
- Individualistic countries --> amount of positive emotions
- Collectivistic countries --> relate that more to how much they are respected by others for living up to norms
- Theory regarding how happy cultures think they should feel
Money: having more money makes you happier up to a certain level, above that level it doesn't matter how much money you have. Latin American countries relatively feel well, but the income/wealth is lower. That might be related to specific traits or specific upbringing.
Culture and happiness
Cultures also vary in terms of the importance that they ascribe to happiness. When presented with either a game that was fun but not useful or a game that was useful but dull: European-Canadians preferred the fun game, Asian-Americans preferred the useful game.
- Euro-Americans go for HAP emotions: enthusiastic, elated, excites, euphoric (the preferred state).
- East-Asians go for LAP emotions: relaxed, calm, peaceful, serene (the preferred state).
Benefits of happiness differ cross-culturally. Cultural difference due to preferred states, not actual states. The preferred state of emotions: the more positive emotions, the less depression (Euro-Americans). Asian-Americans don't show this effect.
Conclusion Emotions
Emotion can be examined by focusing on different aspects of emotion (expression, interpretation, experience, display, reporting). Each focus leads to different conclusions about universality and cultural variability.
Universal ---> Different:
- Physiological process (arousal)
- Experience (interpretation)
- Display or hide expression (display rules)
Motivation
Any condition that initiates, activates or maintains the individual's goal-directed behaviour.
Prevention orientation: one tries to avoid negative outcomes. Eg studying because you want to avoid having to do a non-interesting job in the future. Acculturation example: trying not to lose the values of your home-country. --> focus on weakness to avoid future failure
Promotion orientation: one strives to secure positive outcomes/ trying to obtain something that you value. Eg studying because you want to find a well-paying job in the future. Acculturation example: trying to learn the language soon after migration to obtain a sense of belonging. --> focus on successes to strive for advancement
Persistence after success or failure
Individualistic cultures: more likely to persist after success
Collectivistic cultures: more likely to persist after failure
Face: social value given by others if one fulfils obligations and expectations. Very well known in collectivistic cultures: fitting in in the societal norms to gain face. Others feeling good about you when you have things that are valued by society. So, brand-items (Gucci bags) become important to gain face. It is important to note that face is more easily lost than gained.
Different motivations: Cultures concerned more with face: people have more of a prevention orientation than a promotion orientation. Rather than focusing on feeling good about oneself, people in collectivistic societies focus on others feeling good about them. But not for all motivations!
Maslow's hierarchy of needs: basic needs are universal, no cultural differences. The more to the top will cultural diversity play a bigger role.
Control
Implicit theories of the world
- Entity theory: the world around you is kind of fixed, beyond your ability to change it
- Incremental theory: the world is flexible and responsive to your own effort
Primary control strategies: If you think your actions will be able to change the world (internal locus of control) = more common in the West
Secondary control strategies: External locus of control (the world is fixed, you should adjust) is more common in the non-western countries.
Conclusion Motivation
Concerns about face in some cultures lead them to have a prevention orientation, which is contrasted with having a promotion orientation. Motivations for behaviour (eg coping) is culturally diverse and related to p.e. control orientation.
Acculturation stress
Acculturation: adapting or not adapting to a new culture
Acculturation stress: the consequences of acculturation can be big: anxious feeling; sadness; moodiness and irritability/restlessness; insomnia; obsessive about work/school; feeling isolation or loneliness; homesickness; lower self-esteem; poor work performance; concentration problems; preoccupation about going home; continuous fear about people, food, water; increased criticism and even hatred of the local culture.
Why is migration stressful?
- The cause can be the stressor, sometimes there is war in the home country
- Migration itself
- Consequences of migration: adapting to the new customs
- Acculturation problems: experiences of loss and of conflict.
What happens when we migrate: At first: the honeymoon face experiencing a new environment, meet new people. Second: culture shock, the differences start to kick in, I like it but... And last: adjustment.
Lazarus stress model:primary: threat in terms of wellbeing (aversiveness), secondary: controllability and predictability of threat and also duration, consequences: social, psychological and physical.
there is a stressor --> person evaluates --> depended on the first appraisal, second appraisal --> stress pops up or not --> when it does: coping strategies (zie model bb).
Push and pull factors
- Push: conditions that drive people to leave their country
- Pull: driven/attracted to certain things in the new country
Cultural distance: how much two cultures differ in their overall ways of life. One line of evidence comes from language - the closer one's mother tongue is to English, the easier it is for them to learn English. Similarly, the more similar one's heritage culture is to the host culture, the less acculturative stress they experience.
Cultural fit: the degree to which one's personality is more similar to the dominant cultural values in the host culture. Evidence suggests that people who are high in extraversion fare well in largely extraverted cultures but have problems fitting in the less extraverted cultures. People with more independent self-concepts suffer less distress in acculturating to the US than those with more interdependent self-concepts.
Acculturation strategies: Two issues with implications for outcome of acculturation: attitude toward host culture and attitude toward heritage culture. These two lead to distinct strategies that affect the acculturation experience.
| Strong identification with host culture | Weak identification with host culture |
Strong identification with heritage culture | Integration / alternation Only good option | Separation Distance from majority |
Weak identification with heritage culture | Assimilation Criticize own minority | Marginalization Living in isolation |
- Integration: positive attitudes toward host and heritage culture. Participate in host culture while maintaining traditions of heritage culture. Most successful strategy - least prejudice and greatest social support.
- Separation: negative toward host but positive attitudes toward heritage culture. Minimal participation in host culture while maintaining traditions of heritage culture.
- Assimilation: positive attitudes toward host but a negative attitude toward heritage culture. Participation in host culture while leaving behind traditions of heritage culture.
- Marginalization: Negative attitudes towards host and heritage culture. No effort to engage with host and heritage cultures. Rare and least successful strategy. May characterize third culture kids.
Migration might do something to your self-concept. For biculturals, the multicultural experiences impact the self-concept in two ways:
- Blending: people's self-concepts reflect a hybrid of their two cultural worlds. Evidence suggests that, for the most part, multicultural people appear intermediate on many assessments compared to monocultural people from different cultures.
- Frame-switching: people maintain multiple self-concepts and switch between them depending on the context. Rather than blending two self-concepts, people switch between them. Such self-concepts are represented by a network of ideas in the mind.
Conclusion Acculturation
Acculturation is an extremely difficult topic to study (big variation in acculturation experiences), but due to the consequences still important. Attitudes towards host culture: U shaped, predictable phases over time, 4 acculturation strategies. Small cultural distance and a good cultural fit facilitates the integration process (less stressful). Confrontation with two (or more) cultures --> mainly two strategies occur: blending or frame-switching.
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Cross-Cultural Psychology of Health and Illness (18/19)
Cross-Cultural Psychology of Health and Illness (18/19)
Notes of the lectures for Cross-Cultural Psychology of Health and Illness (CCPHI) 2018/2019. If you want a word document of the notes, leave a comment and I can send them to you! :)
Lecture 2: Cultural transmission, Cross-cultural cognition
Lecture 2: Cultural transmission, Cross-cultural cognition
Cultural evolution
Cultural variation: differences between cultural groups. Cultures are fluid and dynamic, in most cases changing over time. But cultural ideas and norms don't necessarily emerge to address universal problems. Rathe result from cultural learning. Example: fashion, tertiary level.
Sources of cultural variation: ecological geographical differences are important and can lead to far-reaching consequences. Eg availability of food sources, ease of living in specific habitats, interdependence among groups, etc. Local ecologies influence cultural values and norms and can lead to cultural in different ways: proximal causes vs distal causes and evoked culture vs transmitted culture.
Proximal causes: influenced that have direct and immediate effects. - eg when Spanish conquistadors invading had good armour, allowing a quick victory over the Incans, who lacked such technology.
Distal causes: initial differences that lead to effects over long periods of time. - eg because of sufficient food, people could devote their time to nonfood activities such as creating tools.
Evoked culture: specific environmental conditions evoke specific responses from (all) people within that environment, becoming part of a culture. - eg acting in an intimidating manner when your children are being threatened.
Transmitted culture: cultural information passed on or learned via social transmission or modeling. - eg copying behaviour, clothing, aspects of etiquette, etc, from food-finding to social interaction.
Evoked and transmitted culture are not always clearly separated! Eg more emphasis on physical attractiveness due to greater parasite prevalence, vs parents teaching their children to pay attention to physical attractiveness. Transmitted culture is arguably always involved in maintaining cultural norms, even when evoked cultural responses are also present. Evoked culture based on ecological pressures alone cannot explain cultural variation. Transmitted culture represents situation-specific AND group-specific knowledge.
Transmission of cultural information, how is information transferred
- ideas need to be retained
- ideas need to be passed on
Parallel with biological evolution, the main mechanisms are natural selection: increasing proportions of traits that confer a survival advantage; sexual selection: increasing proportion of traits that confer reproductive advantages. Sometimes conflicting!
Cultural evolution
Similarities with biological evolution: Ideas can be persistent (high survival rate) and ideas can be more prone to being passed around (reproduced more).
Differences: cultural ideas can be transmitted horizontally among peers, not only vertically across generations.
What makes ideas interesting and sticky?
Transmission of cultural information
Information going viral: memes: agents of cultural transmission --> shared jokes/context
Communicable ideas
In order to be easily shared, information might be especially useful or informative, elicit an emotional response, be socially desirable, and are simple to communicate. Eg instructional videos (life hacks), messages of common interest (risk of rumours), messages confirming your shared values or messages that are not too complex. The stronger the emotion, the more likely people are to pass a story on.
Ideas generally spread within social networks, leading to clustering of attitudes: Dynamic social impact theory. An account for the origin of culture: norms develop among those who communicate regularly.
Persisting ideas: ideas that have a small number of counterintuitive elements persist longer. Minimal, but noticeable violations of expectation. Characteristics of many religious narratives as well as myth/storytelling. Supported by the research into 'catchiness' of fairy tales: the unknown/unpopular fairy tales have to many of not enough violations of expectation.
How do cultures change?
In recent decades, cultures have been changing and evolving in several ways:
- Increases in interconnectedness: easier & cheaper transportation and long-distance communication allow more connections between cultures. This interconnectedness had created a global culture, many large companies operate internationally. This globalization has been countered by increased tribalism or modern populism (an urge to return to traditional cultures; sense of cultural identity within smaller in-groups).
- Increases in individualism: cultures often studied on an individualism/collectivism (I/S) dimension. Individualism: individual encouraged to consider themselves as distinct from others and prioritize own personal goals over collective goals. Collectivism: individuals encouraged to place more emphasis on one's collective or in-group. Visible when comparing younger and older Americans, proposed reasons include more pressure of time and money, increased suburbanization, more electronic entertainment and living through a 'transformational' experience like WWII. Also visible in traditionally collectivistic cultures (eg Japan): higher divorce rates, decreases in family size and placing a higher value on independence in children.
- Increases in intelligence: longitudinal data suggest that IQ scores rise between 5 and 25 points per generation. Depends on the intelligence test! Some are also dropping (eg vocabulary scores, people are reading less). Largest increase seen for Raven's matrices test, intended to be culture-free. Proposed reasons for increased intelligence include: more people receiving education than before (increased percentage of the population had bachelor's degree) and pop culture has been increasingly more complicated (movies and tv shows have more complicated plots; videogames have become highly complex).
How do cultures persist?
Changes are usually slow, and some cultural qualities persist for far longer than their initial usefulness! Persistence is an effect of pre-existing structure: evolution of culture departs from and is based on, some initial cultural state, such initial cultural states will limit the manner in which future cultural variation takes shape.
Facilitated by pluralistic ignorance(= tendency to collectively misinterpret the thoughts that underlie other people's behaviour. When everyone (incorrectly) assumes everyone else in favour of some cultural norm, they will comply with the norm, thus perpetuating the culture.
Part 1 key points
- There are competing mechanisms by which cultures either change or persist. Parallels with biological evolutions, but generally culture evolves more quickly and less adapted. Behaviours often outlive their usefulness. Cultural differences may have distal or proximal causes and be evoked or transmitted (or a combination).
- Only certain cultural ideas will likely spread successfully within a population. Information is useful, socially acceptable, emotion-inducing and easy to communicate will be passed on more readily.
- Cultures have become increasingly interconnected, individualistic, and intelligent.
Cross-cultural differences in perception and cognition
Thoughts of as mostly universally functions! However, there are cross-cultural differences in the basic phenomena of:
- Sensation: different modalities through different senses: seeing, hearing, touching, smelling, tasting. Different sensitivities: what is perceivable?
- Perception: perceptual organization: how to structure and interpret incoming sensory information.
- Cognition: various cognitive functions: memory, attention, task switching, imagery, reasoning, etc.
Sensing vs perceiving
Sensation: input through the senses: visions/seeing, auditions/hearing, haptic sense/touching, olfactory sense/smelling, gustatory sense/taste and more.
Perception: the conscious percept or experience
Enculturation in perception
Previous exposure leads to changes processing of new information: eg increased sensitivity. Predictability: if you know what to expect, infrequently perceived things become more interesting, but processed less successfully. This applies to faces, weather, colours, tastes, music, etc.
Statistical learning
- What is frequent? - common vs rare
- What goes together? - normal vs surprising
- What is important? - salient aspects of a stimulus are processed more efficiently
Bottom-up & top-down: cognitive processes interact with basic sensory mechanisms to produce a conscious percept. Top-down modulation: internally driven attention. Bottom-up processing: externally driven attention.
New categories in sound
Different cultures lead to different 'auditory environments'. Music: scale notes make up common melodies, but tone is continuous! Music scales are different in different cultures. Your auditory environment teaches you what is normal and what is deviant.
Developing structure in perception: Infants are developing rhythmic categories. Study with violations of structures, with babies they used looking time: they can hear the violations in structure. Rhythmic biases are enculturated!
Auditory environment
Language: The rhythm of composed music caries for languages, even without lyrics!
Normal pairwise variability index: nPVI: calculates the duration variability of successive vocalic duration: how variable is rhythm in speech? The higher the nPVI value, the larger the contrast of successive duration. In Dutch, German and English there are more variations in the language between long and short syllables.
Perception and thinking styles
Analytic and holistic thinking appear to be culturally variant, potentially based on philosophical traditions (Cf. Greek vs Chinese).
Analytic thinkinginvolves focus on objects and attributes, objects perceives as independent from contexts, taxonomic categorization, more prevalent in individualistic societies.
Holistic thinkinginvolves attending to the relations among objects, prediction an object's behaviour on the basis of those relationships, thematic categorization, more prevalent in collectivistic societies.
Change blindness: after exposure to the images (US city-scape and Japanese city-scape), both Japanese and US viewers increase their ability to detect changes in visual scenes. Perceptual environments can induce specific patterns of attention!
Analytic & holistic approaches: relationship between figure and ground (field), focal and contextual information. Field dependence: linking/integrating an object into its context, difficultly to see separate elements. Holistic thinkers perceive a scene as an integrated whole (more field dependence). Analytic thinkers are able to separate objects from each other (field independence).
Field dependence in the lab
The rod-and-frame task: is the line vertical? If given control to operate the machine, Americans became more confident as compared to Chinese.
Fish and background task: Americans were unaffected by background manipulation. Japanese noticed more errors with new background, they were not affected by absent background.
Focal attention: attention operationalized as gaze direction
Reasoning and thinking (effected by analytic and holistic thinker)
- Grouping: what belongs together? - objects characteristics vs relationships, categorization and group memberships.
- Understanding people's behaviour. - intrinsic vs extrinsic forces
- Logical vs dialectical schemas: tolerance for contradiction: right/wrong vs seeking the middle way.
Rule-based reasoning vs resemblance-based reasoning
Understanding the behaviour of others
Analytic thinkers are more likely to make dispositional attributions even when contextual/environmental constraints are made explicit. Holistic thinkers are more likely to pay attention to contextual information and make situational attribution. Tendencies develop with age: differences between Indian & American adults *much* larger for children. Indian adults show reversed attribution error.
Tolerance for contradictions
- Analytic thinking: arguably based on Greek philosophical tradition, heavy on formal logic. Does not accept contradictions: A=B or A=not B.
- Holistic thinking: arguably bases on Chinese philosophical tradition (Confucianism), focus on continual change. Everything in interconnected, moving between opposites.
- Also applies to attitudes to the self: holistic thinkers give more contradictory self-descriptions
- Also applies to future expectations: analytic thinkers assume linear progressions; holistic thinkers expect change.
Other influences on thinking: talking (communication styles)
Vocalizing thoughts helps Westerns, but not Easterners. Interpretation: speech forces focus which facilitates analytic thinking but interferes with holistic thinking.
Language and thought
All spoking communication contains both implicit (ie nonverbal) and explicit information.
- High context cultures = people highly connected with each other, much shared information guides behaviour, less explicit information is needed for communication
- Low context cultures = less shared information, more explicit information is necessary for communication
East-Asian cultures tend to be high-context cultures, Western cultures tend to be low-context cultures. People in high context cultures have a harder time ignoring implicit information than people in low context cultures.
Linguistic relativity
Whorfian hypothesis: Strong version = language determinesthought: without access to the right words, people cannot have certain kinds of thoughts --> Largely rejected.
Weak version = language influencesthought: having access to certain words influences the kinds of thoughts that one has (Much controversy surrounding this claim)
Effects of language on perception and cognition
- Colour perception
- Odour perception
- Temporal perception
- Spatial perception
- Perception of agency
- Numerical cognition & math
Part 2 key points
- Top-down cognitive influences & bottom up perception combine so that specific aspects of a stimulus may be amplified, ignored, or not perceived altogether.
- Exposure to a specific environment shapes future expectation
- While basic sensory mechanisms are likely the same, enculturation leads to different perceptual processing of the same stimuli, in various modalities
- Someone’s perceptual environment shapes how new sensory information is processed
- Culture heavily influences this perceptual environment!
- East Asian and Western people differ in both reasoning and perception
- Differences in application of rules, focus on figure or ground, prioritizing
relationships - Measuring cognition should accommodate for these and other cultural differences
- Differences in application of rules, focus on figure or ground, prioritizing
Overall thoughts and conclusions
Ecological variability (geological/social) is related to cultural differences. Although cultures can change, it appears that superficial (tertiary) aspects might change more readily, while underlying shared values persist for a long time. Cultural differences also impact psychological functions thought to be basic/universal measurable in the lab! Difference may be related to language, to the environment, to cultural importance, etc
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