Reasons for accepting inequality
- Authoritarianism: obedience to authority figures
•intolerance of minorities (ethnic/religious)
•support for more aggressive military force/more likely to condone corruption
•greater income inequality/greater power difference
•more experience with power difference = greater acceptance (learned helplessness)
•high levels of authoritarianism = high levels of fatalism about your own situation - Demographic political engagement
•more fatalism = less political engagement among the poor:
•less political interest, discussion, and electoral participation
•learned experience that the system doesn’t respond to your needs (discouraging)
•reinforces political inequality - Socio-economic status
•different SES = differences in behaviour tendencies
Rich: independent self construal
•engage in more dispositional attributions (I’m rich because of my qualities)
•engage in unethical behaviour (experiments and real life)
Poor: interdependent self construal
•engage in more situational attributions (i’m poor because of my environment)
•stronger sense of empathy and helping behaviour
•don’t tend to engage with/benefit from educational/occupational opportunities
•more likely to engage in behaviours that are perceived to make their situation worse (having more children, harmful health behaviours)
How SES impacts psychology
Bandwidth effect
Why negative outcomes are hard to solve
•without resources, you’re more present oriented, more pessimistic about future (more pressed for time = less options to consider)
•greater external morality risk: cause of death not to do with health concerns (work accidents, bad healthcare, weather)
•greater impulsivity to cope (poverty –> mindset – > behaviour)
Bandwidth effect: our immediate capacity to do demanding tasks (making decisions, controlling yourself) in two forms
1. Cognitive capacity: ability to hold information in our heads
2. Executive control: ability to control our behaviour
focus on lack of resources is involuntary, captures attention: delays bandwidth
•not about inherent capability, but immediate capability
Emotion
A psychological and physiological state in response to a stimulus
•psychological: subjective (what it feels like), with a cognitive component (what kind of thoughts come with emotions)
•physiological: bodily responses (tremble, sweating)
Two primary theories of emotion
1. James-Lange theory of emotion
•some event occurs, creating psychological responses (product of autonomic nervous system - proper reactions to survive)
•you then recognize the psychological responses and give it an emotion label
•no physiological response = no emotion
•ex: you see a bear, your heart races so you associate that with fear then engage in that fear
Problems
•assumes that all emotions have unique set of physiological changes, but any given set of change doesn’t communicate a unique emotion
•not a lot of support
- Facial feedback hypothesis
•by manipulating physiological changes, one can produce distinct emotions
•putting pen in moth when studying makes you feel happy
Two factor theory of emotion •emotions are more than physiological changes, but interpretations Physiological changes (heart racing) + cognitive appraisals (seeing bear as threatening) = emotions
Emotions should vary across cultures because different experiences may lead to different interpretations of physiological responses
Emotional universality
Four lines of evidence emotion is universal
1. Emotional antecedents
•events that elicit certain kinds of emotions that are similar cross culturally
•loss of a loved one, anger where there’s injustice, where there is threat -F/F
- Physiological responses associated with emotions
- Ergotrophic: physiological response that reflect actions of sympathetic nervous system - more about expending energy
•associated with F/F (increased HR, muscular reactivity, and sweating) - Trophotropic: reflects actions of parasympathetic nervous system (relaxing muscles, coming off adrenaline, gastric disturbance, crying)
- Felt temperature: the temperature that one feels when experiencing emotion (cold when sad, hot when angry)
Sad: low erotrophic, high trophotropic, and cold
Angry: high ergotrophic, low trotrophic, and hot
- Emotional appraisal
•stimulus evaluation checks: appraising antecedents along several dimensions - expectation: did you expect the event to occur
- pleasentness: how pleasant was the event
- fairness: how fair/unjust was the event
Variability of emotional expression
When people share one ethnicity, differing on nationality makes a difference because of display rules
• culturally specific rules govern appropriateness and intensity of facial expressions, and even “ritualised” displays
•learned early in life, become automatic by adulthood
- Amplification vs Deamplification
•A: expressing an emotion more intensely than it was actually felt (ex: enthusiasm in the workplace)-
•D: expressing an emotion less intensely than it was actually felt (ex: getting demoted and having to swallow pride) - Neutralization
•express nothing despite feeling an emotion
•ex: seeing your ex with someone else at the bar - Qualification
•displaying an emotion with another to qualify one’s emotions
•not appropriate to express one, so blend it with something more acceptable
•ex: being passive aggressive - Masking
•deploying some other emotion than what’s actually felt
•ex: fake smile - Simulation
•displaying an emotion when one is not experiencing an emotion
•no emotional experience, you’re just faking one
How cultures maintain harmony
East-Asian Collectivism: doesn’t display extreme emotions to not rock the boat
•deamplification, masking, neutralization, and qualification
South American-Collectivism/Individualism: build each other up/celebrate through amplification
Study: Americans vs Himba doing either the anchored task or the free sort
•anchored task: given a set of pictures and a set of labels to match
•free sort task: put the set of pictures into cluster
•Americans: uniformity on anchored tasks, and pretty good on free sort
•Himba: anchored tasks were messed up, and free sort was even worse
Suggests that even though emotions may be universal (basic emotions) our perception of expression differs
•BUT happiness and fear are well recognized globally
Stimulation evaluation checks
- Expectation: did you expect it to occur
- Pleasantness: was it pleasant
- Fairness: was it fair
Leads to different emotional appraisals
Anger: associated with low expectedness, pleasantness, and fairness
Pleasant: associated with high and low expectedness, but high pleasantness, and fairness
Emotional universality:
•happiness, sadness, anger, surprise, disgust, and fear
•other suggestions: contempt, shame, pride, and interest
Ritualized displays
Facial expressions that are idiosyncratic to specific cultural environments
•ex: Inuits express anger in a way that minimizes direct conflict through non threatening jokes or satirical songs
Holistic/collectivism: pay more attention to environmental cues, more impact on emotional expression
Analytic/individualism: more attention to central target when judgement emotional expression, little attention to external factors (fundamental attribution error)
Variability of emotional lexicon
Some languages have unique words for unique emotions
•debate if such differences are meaningful/have consequences to emotional experience
Sapir-whorf Hypothesis (linguistic relativity)
•hard version: language determines how we think and our experience X
•soft version: language affects how we think but is not deterministic
Findings: language helps us think about/articulate ideas, and without words it hinders ability to remember/discuss experience
Gendron Study (GO OVER)
Bicultural perspectives of emotion
- Evolutionary theories
•physiological changes seen as antecedents to emotions, not consequences
•falls under James Lange theory - Social constructivist theories
•contrasting evolutionary theories, the core of emotions lie outside self and within cultural processes
•focus: human nature’s ability to respond to the environment, placing emphasis on role of socialization and development in our emotional experience
•similar to lexical theories - Lexical theories
•emotions rely on the label people have for their subjective experience
•universality for emotions requires lexical equivalence in all languages
•questionable: basic emotions (anger) may be expressed/explained differently in different environments
*culture plays major role in the importance of language - Appraisal theories
•allows for universality in biological features, but cultural variability of evaluative process
•allows for individual variability in appraisals
•culture plays important role in emotional experience due to influence on appraisals/interpretations
Emotional complexity
emotion is under recognized for it’s complexity
•there are many factors that make up emotion, including cultural factors:
1. Aspects of emotion
•subjective experience
•physiology
•intensity: emotions that are very intense flood our system/are difficult to control - not really impacted by culture
- Type of emotion
•positive
•negative
•self conscious emotion: pride/shame/guilt
•culturally based emotions: less rooted in survival functions (unlike basic emotion), and based more on socializations (did your culture teach you to have these emotions) - Emotional context
•cues for emotional expression: presence of cues indicating appropriate emotional expressions- impacted by the culture - The individual
•cultural identification: identifying strongly with a certain cultural environment
•ex: Canadians are apologetic - but if you don’t identify with that, you’re less likely to adopt it
•your own culture’s similarities impact how you identify
Biological model of emotion
Looks at biological and psychological factors of emotion
•core system: scans surroundings to find patterns matching pre-determined situations (ex: between loss of loved one and feeling sad, seeing injustice and feeling angry) and once activated, resulting in response tendencies:
1. Facial expressions: feeling turns visual
2. Autonomic responses: heart rate, goosebumps
•facial expressions+ autonomic responses = subjective experience
*influenced by display/feeling rules
Steps needed before core system
- Input (event): something happens
- Appraisal: know what the situation is (interpreting it) to send to core system
Of the response tendencies
•subjective experience is most susceptible to cultural influence (you might feel anger, but that experience may be different cross culturally)
•facial expression is somewhat susceptible to cultural influence
•autonomic responses are minimally susceptible to cultural influence (it’s so biological)
Ecological factors that impact emotional expressivity
Historical heterogeneity: extent to which a county’s modern population comes from migration from other countries
•Lower: present day pop is sourced from its own countries (or very few countries)
•high context cultures (Japan): people share very similar norms, so you have more certainty on other peoples norms resulting in implicit understanding/less explicit information required
•ex: don’t have to ask what someone means by LOL, you already know)
•Higher: present day pop is sourced from many countries
•lower context cultures (Canada): more uncertainty in communicating emotional states, hindering cooperation/trust, more explicit information required
•ex: LOL, haha, jaja
Adaptive over expressivity: people from highly historically heterogenous countries
•more expressive in facial expression/body language
•emotional expressions are more easily understood/accurately recognized
