Emotions

1. Emotions and words for them

2. Advantages of Irrationality You have an expensive possession, but it would cost you more in lawyer’s fees to recover if it was stolen than it is worth.

3. Advantages of Irrationality What would a rational actor do? What would an irrational actor do? Who is better off?

4. Passions within Reason. Emotions serve as honest, hard-to-fake signals of social commitments. Anger Limerance Shame

5. Prisoner’s Dilemma

6. Anger • If you defect, I will make sure that any benefits that you get from defecting will be far outweighed by the costs I will inflict on you, no matter what it costs me.

7. Shame • I admit that I defected, but I sincerely regret it and I will make amends and never do it again.

8. Limerance • I am so much in love with you, I would never defect.

10. ♀ ♂

12. Substantive questions: • To what degree are emotions biologically endowed or culturally constructed? • What is the nature of the similarity and difference among cultural emotion systems?

13. A continuum of positions: • Universalist: Basic human emotions are experienced and expressed largely independently of the individual's culture background (e.g., Ekman 1974; Izard & Buechler 1980). • Candidate basic emotions: • (Ekman 1974): happiness, sadness, anger, fear, surprise, disgust • (Izard and Buechler 1980): interest, joy, surprise, sadness, anger, disgust, contempt, fear, shame/shyness, guilt

14. Candidate basic emotions: • Izard (1972, 1977): fear, anger, enjoyment, interest, disgust, surprise, shame/shyness, contempt, distress, guilt • Plutchik (1962, 1980a): fear, anger, sadness, joy, acceptance, disgust, anticipation, surprise • Scott (1980): fear, anger, loneliness, pleasure, love, anxiety, curiosity • Epstein (1984): fear, anger, sadness, joy, love • Tomkins (1962, 1963): fear, anger, enjoyment, interest, disgust, surprise, shame, contempt, distress

15. Candidate basic emotions: • Panksepp (1982): fear, rage, panic, expectancy • Arieti (1970): fear, rage, satisfaction, tension, appetite • Fromme & O'Brien (1982): fear, anger, grief/resignation, joy, elation, satisfaction, shock • Osgood (1966): fear, anger, anxiety-sorrow, joy, quiet pleasure, interest/ expectancy, amazement, boredom, disgust

16. Candidate basic emotions: • Shaver & Schwartz (1984): fear, anger, sadness, happiness, love • Fehr & Russell (1985): fear, anger, sadness, happiness, love • Sroufe (1979): fear, anger, pleasure

17. Candidate basic emotions: • Trevarthen (1984): fear, anger, sadness, happiness • Malatesta & Haviland (1982): fear, anger, sadness, joy, interest, pain • Etude (1980): fear, anger, sadness, joy, interest, surprise, distress, shame, shyness, disgust, guilt

18. A continuum of positions: • Relativist: Individuals from different cultures inhabit incommensurate emotional worlds (e.g., Rosaldo 1984). • lek (Balinese) ≠ shame (English) • schadenfreude (German) ≠ gloating (English) • popokl (Melpa) ≠ anger/frustration (English)

19. Middle ground: • Distinguish between the inner experience of subjective emotional states (potentially universal) and the conceptual systems by which the emotions are defined and classified (culturally specific) (e.g., Gerber 1985).

20. False Dichotomy • Emotions are absolutely universally biologically endowed and completely locally culturally constructed. • Differences more rhetorical than real. • Most interesting to explore the nature of the similarity and difference among cultural emotion systems.

21. Methodological question: • How should we assess the similarity and difference of cultural emotion systems?

22. Translation: • Focus: • the semantic relationships among a set of emotion terms.

23. Translation: • Procedure: • Find equivalent sets of emotion terms in two languages. • Ask native speakers to judge the similarity of meanings of the terms. • Assess the degree to which the semantic relationships among the terms are similar for the two languages (e.g., Russell, 1983; Heider, 1991; Romney, Moore, & Rusch, 1997).

24. Translation: • Translation is a prerequisite of the analysis.

25. Results of Translation Method • Adequate to show circumplex structure of the emotion space (e.g., Russell, 1983; 1989).

26. English English

27. Chinese Chinese

28. Croatian Croatian

29. Gujarati Gujarati

30. Japanese Japanese

31. Results of Translation Method • Adequate to show circumplex structure of the emotion space (e.g, Russell, 1983; 1989). • Useful to compare patterns of synonomy (e.g., Heider, 1991). • Sufficient to demonstrate that emotion words in one language are not neatly equivalent to emotion words in another language.

32. Karl Heider, 1991 • Bahasa Minangkabau • Bahasa Indonesia • Javanese

33. Results of Translation Method • Inadequate to show that speakers of different languages “share a single model of the semantic structure of emotion terms” (e.g., Romney, Moore, & Rusch, 1997).

34. Romney, Moore, and Rusch

35. Whorf

36. Lenneberg’s critique: • If the other language represents a wildly different way of understanding the world, one loses that world view as soon as one has rendered it into English. • The method presumes the answer to the research question itself: The degree of correspondence between emotion systems cannot be assessed if one presumes to know the corresponding terms from the outset.

37. Translation should be a result of the analysis, not it's first step. • Problem compounded with circumplex spaces like emotion.

38. Mistranslation can preserve a circumplex semantic structure. original language

39. Mistranslation can preserve a circumplex semantic structure. translation

40. Connotation vs denotation • “Just because both God and ice cream are both strong and good, doesn’t mean that they are equivalent.” (Richard Shweder) • Similarity judgment does not get at either reference or meaning.

41. Mapping: • Focus: • the mapping of emotion terms to a collection of referents.

42. Mapping: • Procedure: • Present emotionally evocative stimuli to native speakers. • Ask native speakers to identify the emotion expressed in the emotional stimuli. • Assess the degree to which the implied similarity of the stimuli is similar for the two languages. • Similar tactic used in cross-cultural comparison of color classification and ethnobiology.

43. Mapping: • Translation is a consequence of the analysis.

44. Male faces

45. Female faces

46. Identification task • Present to informants 22 photographs of an actor and an actress expressing emotions selected to evenly sample Russell's circumplex emotion space. • Ask them to give a word or short phrase that best describes how the person is feeling. • Record the responses.

47. Identification task • Collapse various forms of the same root (e.g., anger = angry; sadness = sad, etc.). • Weed out rare or idiosyncratic responses. • Build a mapping matrix that represents the mapping of terms (rows) to the photographs (columns).

48. English Mapping Matrix

49. Shuar Mapping Matrix

50. Identification task • Correlate the columns of the matrix to infer the similarity of the faces implied by the mapping. • Perform a correspondence analysis of the stacked mapping matrices to see how terms map to the faces.