According to a common sense theory, facial expressions signal specific emotions to people of all ages and therefore provide children easy access to the emotions of those around them. The evidence, however, does not support that account. Instead, children’s understanding of facial expressions is poor and changes qualitatively and slowly over the course of development. Initially, children divide facial expressions into two simple categories (feels good, feels bad). These broad categories are then gradually differentiated until an adult system of discrete (...) categories is achieved, likely in the teen years. Children’s understanding of most specific emotions begins not with facial expressions, but with their understanding of the emotion’s antecedents and behavioral consequences. (shrink)

The purpose of this study was to examine cultural influences on shame. In particular, the focus was to assess the influence of the following factors on the object of shame : the effect of individualism/collectivism, measured by a widely used standardized measurement; the role of tightness/looseness ; and the patterns of within- and between-cultural differences and similarities. Data were collected from two American and two Japanese universities to test within- and between-cultural influences on the object of shame. Participants were asked (...) to describe and rate three autobiographical experiences of shame, with each successive request being increasingly specific in asking for shame about something for which the participant did not feel responsible. Cultural differences in tightness and looseness, both within and between the two nations, were predictive of the likelihood that participants would report vicarious shame. In contrast, standard measures of individualism-collectivism did not predict these differences. These findings suggest that culture affects the object of shame. However, in contrast to our hypothesis, attitudinal measures of individualism/collectivism were not a significant predictor. Rather, tightness/looseness determined by ecological factors was the better predictor of some cultural differences on the object of shame. Furthermore, these findings imply that attitudinal measures of individualism/collectivism may not agree with ecological measures, and that including multiple samples from each language/nation effectively reduces the confound between culture and language. (shrink)

Psychological research on emotion perception anchors heavily on an object perception analogy. We present static “cues,” such as facial expressions, as objects for perceivers to categorize. Yet in the real world, emotions play out as dynamic multidimensional events. Current theoretical approaches and research methods are limited in their ability to capture this complexity. We draw on insights from a predictive coding account of neural activity and a grounded cognition account of concept representation to conceive of emotion perception as a stream (...) of synchronized conceptualizations between two individuals, which is supported and shaped by language. We articulate how this framework can illuminate the fundamental need to study culture, as well as other sources of conceptual variation, in unpacking conceptual synchrony in emotion. We close by suggesting that the conceptual system provides the necessary flexibility to overcome gaps in emotional synchrony. (shrink)

On the assumption that shame is a universal emotion, cross-cultural research on shame relies on translations assumed to be equivalent in meaning. Our studies here questioned that assumption. In three studies (Ns, 108, 120, 117),shamewas compared to its translations in Spanish (vergüenza) and in Malayalam (nanakedu). American English speakers usedshamefor the emotional reaction to moral failures and its use correlated positively withguilt, whereasvergüenzaandnanakeduwere used less for moral stories and their use correlated less with the guilt words. In comparison with Spanish (...) and Malayalam speakers’ ratings of their translations, American English speakers ratedshameandguiltto be more similar to each other. (shrink)

Previous research has found a rich lexicon of shame and guilt terms in Chinese, but how comparable these terms are to “shame” or “guilt” in English remains a question. We identified eight commonly used Chinese terms translated as “shame” and “guilt”. Study 1 assessed the Chinese terms’ intensities, social characteristics, and action tendencies among 40 Chinese speakers. Testing term production in the reverse direction, Study 2 asked another Chinese-speaking sample (N = 85) to endorse emotion terms in response to eight (...) eliciting scenarios generated using each term’s social characteristics from Study 1. A native English-speaking sample (N = 83) was also included to examine the production of English emotion terms and compare motivational tendencies cross-culturally. Using this cross-referencing method, we found that some of the Chinese terms shared similar social-functional characteristics to their English translation, but some had distinct profiles. The two large shame-like and guilt-like term categories yielded in Study 1 were replicated in Study 2’s Chinese term-production task where larger-scale correspondences between categorised elicitors and term clusters were found. Meanwhile, English speakers’ term use provided further evidence for the equivalence between some Chinese terms and “shame” or “guilt” both in terms of their social and motivational characteristics. (shrink)

Do different languages have a translation for the English word disgust that labels the same underlying concept? If not, the English word might label a culture-specific concept. Four studies compared disgust to its common translation in Hindi and in Malayalam by examining two components of the concept thought of as a script: causal antecedent and facial expression. The English word was used to refer to reactions to both unclean substances and moral violations; Hindi and Malayalam translations referred mainly to moral (...) violations. Speakers of all three languages associated different facial expressions to unclean substances and moral violations. Words for disgust in the three languages failed a test of translation equivalence. (shrink)