- Powerful emotions feel
like irrefutable facts. They wash over us, take over our bodies, and change our perceptions. We call this: where your emotional experiences feel like they are the truth
of the world around you, when in reality, the
culture that we live in is, in a sense, shaping your emotions and your emotions are
then serving as a lens for interpreting the world around you. And the notion that
people could be thinking and feeling something that
is completely different from what we would
think
or feel in that context is, frankly, kind of scary. But understanding that people don't necessarily have the
same emotional mind as us could really open our eyes to how it is that we're
perceiving interactions in day-to-day life. I'm Kristen Lindquist, and I'm a professor of
psychology and neuroscience at The University of North
Carolina at Chapel Hill, and I study the neural and
cultural basis of emotion. The study of emotion has really come from sort of two intellectual
lineages over ti
me: One is medicine and the
other is anthropology and the study of culture, and as a result, to this day, psychology still kind of pits these two different perspectives
against one another. Ultimately, what our brain is doing, on a moment-to-moment basis,
is try to keep us alive, and many scholars have suggested that emotions actually evolved
in order to keep us alive; to ensure our survival in a
world that was filled with bears and tigers and big animals
that were trying to eat us. Cultures evo
lve too. Emotions are like cultural artifacts. They're things that are
passed down over time from one individual to the next, like art and religion and
the language that you speak. Now, I should clarify, this is not to say that there isn't a biological
basis for those things. All humans are born
with the basic hardware that helps the brain create emotions, but which emotions a person experiences are very much a product of their culture. So your culture is shaping your emotions and your emotions,
in turn, are shaping your perception of the world. So the brain, ultimately,
is a predictive organ. What that means is that it's trying to create
a model of the world around it based on learning and prior experiences, and use that information
to make best guesses about what's going to happen next. And the experiences that you've had, which are very much nested in culture, can trickle down to the
operation of single neurons that are processing visual sensations in the world around you. So in the
moment when you're
experiencing a strong emotion, you have this instance
of affective realism and that is coloring how
it is that your brain is literally picking up the information that it's taking in from
your eyes and your ears and all of your other senses. And so in that sense, we can have these emotion-induced biases whereby what you're feeling
is literally shaping whether you see the presence of a threat. A very classic example of this is something called a 'shooter bias.' When people are
under particularly high cardiovascular intensity, they tend to misperceive objects as things that are threatening, like guns. So one thing that we can do
to check our emotion bias is to be aware of what we're feeling in any given point in time. And to also check in and think, "Is this feeling consistent
with the context? Does this feeling actually make sense given what's going on around me?" It's important to understand that emotions are not
universal across cultures. There's important differenc
es
in what it means to feel angry or sad or fearful, and one of the most prominent
focuses of this work has been on cultures that are high in what's called Many Western, industrialized cultures are cultures that are
high in individualism; where you really seek to see yourself as an individual who
has their own thoughts, their own beliefs, their
own emotions, and so on. Now, collectivist cultures
are, in many ways, opposite to this in the sense that who you are
doesn't really matter so much- and
you derive value,
and a sense of self even, from being a part of that group. It's interesting that
even the effect of stress seems to have a slightly
different impact on people in cultures around the world. As a case in point, in the United States, anger is about making yourself different from the people around you, it's about showing that some
sort of violation has occurred, setting a line in the sand and saying, "You did something wrong to me." And when individuals in the
United States experie
nce anger, we see an increase in inflammation. Too much inflammation, too much stress ends up creating things like cardiovascular disease
and many other disorders. In Japan, anger does not show a robust increase in inflammation. In Japan, anger is a signal that harmony in the
group has been disrupted, and a signal to mend bonds. A different physiological response to the same exact emotional experience. Culture very much defines who we are, who we see ourselves
as, who we want to be, and people t
alk a lot in biology about biological sex differences, and this topic certainly comes into play when thinking about emotions. People think that in mammals, females are caregivers and males are not and that, as a result, this
has entrained the brain over the course of biological evolution to be more emotional, perhaps,
in females of the species and less in the males. However, it's also the case
that our cultures bring to bear a lot of top-down information
with regards to gender- and this gendered
information is imposed onto biological sex. So women are perceived as overly
emotional in many cultures, to the extent that women
who go to the hospital, for instance, with heart palpitations are often diagnosed as having anxiety as opposed to heart attacks. Women die of heart attacks more frequently when admitted to the ER. Whereas boys are expected
to be relatively stoic or, if they express emotions, to have strong, dominant emotions, such as anger or pride. The result is that at the
level of
the individual, if you're not meeting the
norms of your society, if you feel out of sync with those norms, then that can cause a lot
of stress and self-doubt and feeling like you are somehow different from people around you, when in reality there's
actually far more variation in the emotions that people
experience, of both genders, than the sort of stark gender
differences would suggest. So if we took a second
and checked how it is that we think the world should see us, as opposed to how we act
ually
want to see ourselves or how we actually feel ourselves to be, then that might open up some avenues for people to feel more
authentically like themselves. Much can be learned from
the language that people use to describe emotions. We have taken for granted,
in the science of emotion, for really decades now,
that people around the world experience the emotion categories that we as English speakers think are the sort of central
emotion categories of life. And these are what in language are c
alled: Basic level categories are those that new language
learners acquire first, so for instance, when you are learning to
differentiate animals, you differentiate dogs and cats and birds, you don't differentiate terriers
and Siamese, and robins, and in very much the same way, emotion categories such
as anger and sadness and fear and disgust are basic
level categories in English. Now, on the one hand, people have argued, "Well, language is just
the tool that's used to communicate the experience
." Yet, enough research
has been done over time to suggest that the words
do have different meanings in ways that are important culturally. The evidence suggests that only about 22% of
languages around the world have a word that is roughly similar to the English language word "fear," and really only 13% have
a word that is equivalent to the English language word, "surprise." So one thing that people often question when they hear these
types of statistics is, "Well, what does it mean for a cultur
e not to
have a word like fear?" Fear itself seems so basic,
so critical to our survival and surely people from
cultures around the world experience threats and experience their
hearts beating quickly when their lives are in danger. And that is not in question. The question is, how
it is that their brains are making meaning of those instances, and experiencing them
as something separate from other types of mental states. And there's some evidence that in some small-scale
cultures, in particular,
emotion words just aren't that central to how it is that individuals
are making meaning of their own internal lives and the internal lives of others. Instead, they focus much more
on the behavioral actions that are accompanying situations. The result is that we can misunderstand what others are feeling because of the language that they're using to describe their states. In much of the early
theorizing about emotion, it was assumed that
facial muscle movements were automatically triggered means
of signaling somebody's
internal state to other people. The theory has progressed
on this over time to suggest that it may be
that people are communicating what they feel with
their facial expressions, but not automatically and reflexively, in much the same way that
they would use language. I will use the term, "Resting
Bitch Face" as an example of people misperceiving what it is that somebody is experiencing
when a woman, in particular, has a relatively flat, slack face, people assume that she
is mean or grumpy. I always note that there is no corresponding
"Resting Jerk Face" for men, but that also has to do
with our cultural biases about who should be experiencing
which emotions when. There's some nice work that has been done using computer graphics to
randomly display an avatar's face and randomly move its facial muscles, and so participants from China
saw a movement of an eyebrow or a wrinkling of the lip that Western perceivers did not see. In the U.K., there were
facial muscle mo
vements associated with an emotion like anger that were not perceived to be associated with that emotion category in China. So there's a fair amount of variability in which specific facial muscle movements are associated with different categories. And what's really critical to understand is that the signals that
people make with their face need not give some
veridical representation of what it is that they're feeling, but secondly, that we are
imposing our own cultural biases onto people's facia
l muscle movements. A case that comes to mind
occurred when I was in Japan, and I was in a place where a lot of foreigners
didn't typically visit and I was sitting in a cafe by myself and tried to put a finger
on why it was the case I was feeling so uncomfortable, and I suddenly realized that
nobody was looking at me. I was sticking out like a sore thumb, as this foreign white woman,
sitting in this suburban cafe and not a single person
was paying attention to me, trying to figure out why
I was
there, who I was- and I realized that in the United States it would be very typical to feel curious, to, you know, give somebody a smile, to make them, you know,
feel more welcome perhaps, or even just indicate that you noticed that they were unique. And in Japan, that very
much goes against the grain of the culture. It is rude to stare at somebody. I realized that my cultural frame was influencing my emotional experiences and how I expected others to be having emotional experiences. This all co
mes down to something which in philosophy is called: which is that we can
never truly understand the content of other people's minds. And yet, when we encounter people from different cultures in daily life, even within our own cities, people who come from
different regional backgrounds or have different religious backgrounds or even have different
political identities, it can be stressful to
encounter other cultures and realize that something is
just a little bit out of sync. If you recognize th
at
everybody's psychology is a little bit distinct, and that you are perhaps imposing
your own bias onto things and have more of an open mind about trying to learn
what somebody is feeling, instead of assuming, then there's more avenues for
connections across groups. Each person is bringing to bear, really, something that is unique, a unique angle on the world around them and, ultimately, this
diversity in perceptions could lead us to better answers about how it is that the world works.
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