Re: [xmca] Emotions

[mike cole <lchcmike@gmail.com>]

Glad you are delving, Martin. I was just judging from what you posted.
mike

On Wed, Jul 7, 2010 at 8:00 PM, Martin Packer <packer@duq.edu> wrote:

> Mike,
>
> Digging a bit more into the papers on his web site, I would say that
> Ekman's position on cultural variation is more nuanced than I gave him
> credit for. First, there are different "display rules" both across and
> within cultures:
>
> "If people
> are not trying to mask or suppress their emotions.
> then their expressions will be understandable to us no
> marterwhat the race, culture, language, age or sex ofthe
> person who shows them. That is a big if. however, for we
> often follow display rules in social life to manage and
> disguise our emotional expressions. and these do vary
> with age, sex, social class and culture"
>
> Second, people have to interpret each other's facial expressions, and they
> do this in complex ways which he proposes may be agreed upon within a
> cultural group, but presumably may differ across cultures:
>
> "We know virtually nothing about the type of infromation people typically
> derive
> from a facial expression when they see the expression in situ, accompanied
> as it
> usually is by speech, gestural and postural behaviors, and when the person
> observing the face has the usual array of expectations about what may be
> most
> likely to occur in that situation.... I expect that we could find better
> than chance agreement within a cultural
> group about each of these emotion-related messages -
> antecedents,simultaneous
> behaviors, metaphors, and consequent events - just as we have found
> agreement about specific emotion terms."
>
> Third:
>
> "Individual differences in our experience allow for enormous variations in
> the specifics of what calls forth emotion that are attributable to
> personality, family,
> and culture." Although what Ekman calls the "antecedents" of each emotion
> show commonalities - for example "An actual or threat of harm for fear. The
> loss of an object to which one was attached
> for sadness. An event that is either unexpected or contrary to expectation
> for surprise" -  what counts as a threat of harm, for example, will be
> different in different cultures.
>
> Furthermore, "the capacity to represent emotional experience in words
> changes many
> aspects of emotional experience," itself of course a cultural process, and
> since cultures differ in the words available to talk about emotions these
> changes have a cross-cultural component
>
> Martin
>
> On Jul 7, 2010, at 9:38 PM, mike cole wrote:
>
> > Social, but no culture?
> > Context but no culture?
> > hmmmmm. How is that possible?
> > (have not changed sub line)
> > mike
> >
>
>
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