## Highlights ### id262790059 > n one [experiment](https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2016-19236-001), published in 2016, just 7 per cent of Trobriander subjects correctly identified anger from posed photographs. The prototypical disgust face, in turn, was often seen as sad, angry or afraid. Only the smiling face was, by a slim majority of volunteers (58 per cent), matched to happiness. By contrast, a control group in Spain, shown the same photos, correctly identified the depicted emotions 93 per cent of the time, on average. In another study, Crivelli found that Trobrianders consistently ‘misread’ the paradigmatic fear face – eyes wide open, mouth gasping – deeming it angry and threatening. And when the standard forced-choice procedure was relaxed, about a fifth of the subjects [insisted](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27736108/) they didn’t know what emotion they were looking at when presented with a sad or a disgusted face. (In fact, in this study, the most common response to all but the happy face was not an emotion word at all but ‘*gibulwa*’, which roughly translates as a desire to avoid social interaction.) - [View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01fqy6knpss7geygvr2rbqpez0) ### id262790064 > Crivelli’s findings, paralleled by another team working in Africa, are hard to square with the Universality Thesis but not with the perspective I’ve been calling the Diversity Thesis. Known also as psychological constructionism, this alternative theory burst on to the scene in 2003, with a [paper](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12529060/) by Russell that, to this day, is among the most cited in affective science. Here, Russell laid out a new vision for the intricate ways that nature and nurture interact to produce the familiar yet enigmatic states we know as our emotions. - [View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01fqy6m1t8wrnkcad37qnzpe59) ### id262790177 > The construction of emotions is also highly situated, so no two episodes of fear or anger or sadness need share the same components. If you feel afraid, your eyes might snap wide open, Russell argues – but only in cases when a wider field of vision can help you dodge a threat. Likewise, you might want to flee – or to sit and study for tomorrow’s exam. There could be, in fact, an infinite number of possible emotional states with no discrete signatures that let us cleanly separate them from other mental phenomena. According to Russell, nothing short of the whole of psychology can adequately encapsulate and explain every instance of human emotion. If this is true, it will no doubt frustrate scientists. But every other human being, I imagine, would find comfort in the knowledge that even our pettiest bouts of rage can hide some deep organismic intelligence; that, rather than the remnants of our bestial natures bursting out to torture or embarrass us, our emotions might be complex acts of meaning-making that show us who we are – tangled and sophisticated, even inscrutable to ourselves. Also: very, very different indeed. - [View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01fqy6p6gdx1wp0jcz9w4hxe70) ### id262790195 > Lindquist’s initial research set out to demonstrate how brains construct emotions on the spot, by categorising core affect. In one [study](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/18947355/), published in 2008, some subjects were asked to tell a fear-related story, while others reflected on anger or a neutral topic. Lindquist found that, when the fear-primed participants listened to a rowdy mix of Holst and the *Carmina Burana*, designed to put them into a highly aroused, unpleasant state, they later displayed significantly more risk aversion – an implicit measure of fear – than the rest. It seemed that the concept of fear, made more accessible to these subjects’ minds, had attached itself to their free-floating negative affect and converted it into an actual experience of fear. - [View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01fqy6q3qy51s8ys7j5c18kmct) ### id262790225 > Most Americans, for instance, felt ashamed when their personal flaws were revealed, a pattern consistent with a culture that places high importance on the individual. For the Japanese, on the other hand, situations that exposed one’s own failings not only did not cause shame, they were not taken very seriously at all. Instead, congruent with their interdependent cultural values, it was losing face in public that shamed the majority of Japanese subjects. (The Belgians exhibited a type of shame that fell somewhere in between the other two.) What these findings suggest is that culture doesn’t merely add local colour: it profoundly shapes the content of our emotional lives. Rather than qualifying as things we ‘have’, ‘experience’ or ‘feel’ – that is, static, given – emotions, argue Boiger and Mesquita, are dynamic, situated processes that help us navigate the social environments we inhabit. - [View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01fqy6qxqqt79vv6vp2gh1fxp9) ### id262790280 > These differences can be startling. ‘I ask my American participants how they’re feeling,’ she tells me. ‘I give them a list of emotions. They are done with that list in under a minute.’ With Chinese participants, the same task would take many minutes to complete. In Ghana, the experiment verged on ‘a disaster’. ‘My students would sit there with this one page of emotion terms for 30-40 minutes, just that page. And when I ask them what is happening, they would say: “Well, I understand all the words … but how am I supposed to know what I feel? … And as an emotion researcher and a cultural researcher, I was stunned because the fact that people know how they feel is never something I questioned.’ - [View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01fqy6s6nads5d0ntmnptbnycp) ### id262790297 > Americans report sadness while Chinese participants notice goosebumps, sweaty palms and muscle aches - [View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01fqy6szbx4bcd2hk7j052h0nd) ### id262790421 > In part, such findings can reflect differences in early socialisation practices. In many non-Western cultures, parents use a limited range of emotion words with their children, giving more weight to behaviours or bodily changes. Qi Wang, a professor of human development at Cornell University in New York, has [observed](https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1750698016645238) that, when European American parents share memories with their kids, they tend to put the focus on the child’s own feelings and unique role in the situation. East-Asian American parents, by contrast, prefer to emphasise their children’s relatedness to others, using shared memories to bring up social norms and instil lessons for future behaviour. According to Wang, such conversations serve to transmit cultural values, guiding what gets internalised and what inhibited during development. By structuring our external environment in particular ways, our parents also scaffold our internal landscapes. - [n] This really jives with my experiences as a parent where I'm expected to teach my son emotions and the words for his emotions, and we look at emotion books to identify different emotions. It makes sense that these aren't inherently obvious or inborn. - [View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01fqy6tajchk4d7h5rqaw8pb11) ### id262790815 > Consider the so-called ‘Chinese somatisation’. Research in the 1980s found that depressed Chinese patients did not experience the illness in the ‘correct’ way. Instead of the expected psychological symptoms, they reported various aches, lack of sleep and exhaustion, leading scholars and doctors to puzzle over the missing emotions. But for Chentsova-Dutton, experiencing distress as somatic (ie, in the body, as distinct from the mind) could be part of a more general pattern of sense-making specific to Chinese culture. Initial support for this hypothesis can be found in recent [studies](https://doi.apa.org/doiLanding?doi=10.1037/a0018534) that looked at subjects’ responses to sad films or music. American participants ‘report sadness and then nothing else, even if you ask about it’. Chinese participants, meanwhile, tend to notice a broad range of physiological changes, including goosebumps, sweaty palms, heart palpitations and muscle aches. ‘From a Western cultural perspective, we have called it somatisation to mark that this is an unusual pattern,’ Chentsova-Dutton told me. ‘But if you imagine a view from Chinese culture outward, you can also name it psychologisation.’ - [n] This is a useful paradigm and mode of thinking when writing a story. I can see this being a #fic/storyStem for a short story, targeted at a magazine, where it's a bit weird and the point is to understand this different perspective. - [View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01fqy6x5nc4ydvj01t56y9zbmg) ### id262790851 > As I find out, I cannot, in fact, imagine this. It’s easier for me to picture Tinker Bell pressing switches in my head than to ponder, even hypothetically, the dimming of my emotional world. My thoughts and feelings are how I know myself, where I spend most of my time. Thinking of emotions not as the grounded truth of existence but as one mode of understanding – a self-preoccupation, a psychologisation – is impossible for me. And yet, I can’t help but appreciate the poetic justice of this impossibility. It is craftsmanship of a different order when nature and nurture collide, when biology and culture fuse together to create human diversity that trumps the imagination. Pixar’s is an amateur’s play. - [View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01fqy6xvexhezj6qa9g0aw6s5y)