[xmca] Emotions

[Martin Packer <packer@duq.edu>]

...and here is Ekman writing on the universality of emotional expression, in a paper title Universality of Emotional Expression? A Personal History of the Dispute. He is commenting on a criticism of his work by Margaret Mead:

"Perhaps Mead thought I was claiming that emotions operate
like instincts, uninfluenced by social experience. That was not
my position; finding universals in expressions does not mean that
expressions are not socially influenced. Our findings on how
socially learned display rules produced a cultural difference in
the public behavior of Japanese and Americans should have made
that clear.... I had emphasized that
facial expressions '... are embedded in a context; they may be
elicited by different stimuli, be operated upon by different display
rules, be blended with other affects, and be followed by different
behavioral consequences. We do not mean to belittle these factors;
in actuality we want to focus attention on these factors as
the major sources of cultural differences in affect displays.'... 
Social experience influences
attitudes about emotions, creates display and feeling rules,
develops and tunes the particular occasions which will most
rapidly call forth an emotion. [However] I believe that much of the initial emotion-specific
physiological activity in the first few milliseconds of an emotional
experience is also not penetrable by social experience"

Martin

p.s. I changed the subject line


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