SAD, ANGER, FEAR, DISGUST, HAPPY, CONTEMPT AND OTHERS ARE EVOLUTIONARILY DICTATED ADAPTIVE SURVIVAL MECHANISMS Darwin Tompkins Ekman Izard

 James Russell  Marieke DeMoii  Rachel Jack  THERE ARE NO DISCRETE EMOTIONS, THERE ARE EMOTIONAL PATTERNS AND THE PATTERNING IS DIFFERENT AMONG CULTURES. E.G.

 Experiment: Screening Passengers By Observation Technique (SPOT) at U.S. airports. Based on Universal Theory. Not one terrorist caught, lots of congressional criticism. Universal Theory looks to be premature for influencing technology.

 This company tells us how to get along in China. This company tells us how to get along in China.  (put cursor on above, right click, and choose  “open hyperlink”)  A little premature?

There are a number of ways of doing this but the basic paradigm is to show subjects from various cultures photos of facial expressions and ask them to sort them. Cluster analysis and similar techniques are applied.

Jack et al. found that Chinese subjects living temporarily in Scotland did not identify emotion faces similarly to western subjects. Will bicultural Chinese American subjects identify emotion pictures similar to Ekman’s studies or similar to Jack et al.’s results? What is the influence of culture? Chinese American Subjects will do several tasks. They will free sort (thus eliminating advance categories) Ekman’s photos into piles. The pattern will be analyzed with multidimensional scaling (MDS). They will also make forced choice selection among Ekman’s categories. They will also be asked to give their own emotion label to the pictures. Further, they will be photographed posing Ekman’s set of emotions and any other emotion they feel is important. This is a broad based exploratory approach which includes a mix of experimental paradigms used in many past studies, and answers some criticisms of past methodologies (such as the forced choice category paradigm). Are the resulting patterns and sorts closer to Ekman’s traditional and well known results? Or closer to Jack et al.’s results (many overlapping categories). Is the MDS pattern also familiar (as in Russell’s circumplex dimensional model)? Finally, and in a simple qualitative exploration, do the Chinese Americans report during a closing interview the same categories of emotions as Ekman? Do they emphasize categories at all? Implications for cross-cultural communication will be discussed.

 Affective Neuroscience  The Facial Feedback Hypothesis  Interaction of Cognitive, Cultural, and Biological factors.  Are Emotions Best Thought of As Discrete or as Dimensions?