Which Emotions Are Uniquely Human

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The issue of emotion vocabulary remains a crucial topic in the ongoing debate in psychology of language, namely the debate between linguistic universalism ...
Studies in the Psychology of Language and Communication. Warszawa: Matrix 2010

Which Emotions Are Uniquely Human? Understanding of Emotion Words Across Three Cultures Michał Bilewicz, Małgorzata Mikołajczak, Tomohiro Kumagai, Emanuele Castano

The issue of emotion vocabulary remains a crucial topic in the ongoing debate in psychology of language, namely the debate between linguistic universalism and linguistic relativism (Kurcz, 2000). In the psychological, linguistic and anthropological scholarship there is an ongoing controversy about the cross-cultural and cross-linguistic universality of emotions and emotion words (Ekman; 1992; Elfenbein & Ambady, 2002; Russel, 1991; Wierzbicka, 1995; 1999). This controversy has affected both the literature on the recognition of emotions expressed in the face (Matsumoto & Ekman, 1989) and the literature on emotion lexicons (Russel, 1991). Emotion scientists usually agree that there is a certain set of basic emotions (fear, anger, disgust, enjoyment, sadness) that may be experienced not only by humans but by other species as well (Buck, 1999; Ekman, 1992). This assumption makes such emotions good candidates for the list of culturally universal emotions. However, even such a constrained list raises numerous questions. For instance, early research on facial expressions undermined the universality of fear, disgust and anger recognition (Matsumoto, & Ekman, 1989). Later, linguistic studies proved that most of the human languages do not even have words corresponding in meaning to English words such as fear, anger, disgust, enjoyment, sadness (Wierzbicka, 1995). Researchers from a constructivist-relativist perspective would perceive all emotions as being socially constructed. Acknowledging the difference between emotion lexicons in different cultures, they typically claim that the emotions themselves would be experienced differently across cultures (Harre, 1986). According to such a relativist standpoint, this diversity in emotion lexicons should affect the establishing of categories, also the categories used to name, process Address for correspondence: Michał Bilewicz, University of Warsaw, Faculty of Psychology, Stawki 5/7, 00-183 Warszawa, Poland. E-mail: [email protected]

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and understand emotional states. In his review of ethnographic literature, Russel (1991) suggests that there are no equivalents of many English emotions in some other languages, while some other emotions, commonly used in these languages, do not have English equivalents.

Lay understanding of emotions in cultures: conceptualizations The emotion literature includes several attempts to construct a universal concept of lay understanding of emotions. Anna Wierzbicka, a prominent representative of the cultural approach, suggests that it is possible to define all emotion words in different languages using simplified semantic meta-language (Wierzbicka, 1992; 1995). Wierzbicka points out that there is no isomorphism between concepts of single emotion words in different languages. Thus, there is no point in selecting a list of basic emotions from a certain language (i.e. English), and then measuring its universality as lay understanding of emotions in other languages. Instead, she calls for universal human concepts that would enable the large cross-cultural variation of emotion categories to be portrayed. According to Wierzbicka (1992), such concepts are prototypes (mental scenarios) of a situation linked with a given feeling – and these could be reduced to the basic parameters in which people think about such emotional situations, using concepts such as ‘bad’, ‘good’, ‘happen’, ‘do’, ‘want’, ‘don’t want’, ‘I’ and ‘someone’. The main problem with this perspective is that it depicts people as employing quite complex cognitive strategies whenever they feel emotions or think about them. Current discoveries of neuroscience, however, suggest that different neural processes are employed in processing affect and cognition – the first being generally faster, more automatic, less conscious (LeDoux, 1996). Therefore, it does not seem possible that people would be able to use complex reasoning for every lay interpretation of emotion. Another perspective on the universal lay concepts of emotions comes from the research by Russel and collaborators (Russel & Mehrabian, 1977; Russel, 1991; Russel, Lewicka, & Niit, 1989). Using semantic differential techniques, they indicated three main bipolar dimensions underlying emotion ratings in all cultures: pleasure (or valence), arousal (or activity) and dominance (or power). These dimensions are considered as universal features defining the meaning of emotion words. In further cross-cultural studies, Russel and collaborators (Russel, Lewicka, & Niit, 1989) reduced the number of core dimensions to two: pleasure and arousal. However, after using multidimensional scaling on other national samples, the researchers proved the existence of pleasure and dominance as the key dimensions in some, and pleasure and arousal in other cultures (Russel, 1991). In numerous studies Russel and colleagues showed the cultural universality of the 3 (or combination of 2) emotion dimensions, but they rarely focused on the universality of specific emotions. However, in an interesting attempt to determine if the meaning of emo-

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tion words would be similar across different languages, Russel and Sato (1995) found that participants speaking Chinese, Japanese and English did not differ in their attributions of 14 emotion words translated into their languages. Thus, their argument counteracted the linguistic and psychological scholarship that perceives emotion words as having no equivalents in other languages. In the study presented below, we approached the issue of emotion universality from a different perspective, namely by investigating the strength of inter-cultural correlation of the perception of the human uniqueness of a variety of emotions.

Human-uniqueness as a crucial feature of emotions in intergroup relations There is considerable evidence that people intuitively divide emotions into the categories of ‘uniquely human’ and ‘non-uniquely human’ (Demoulin et al., 2004). In many languages, different terms have been coined for the ‘uniquely human’ and ‘non-uniquely human’ emotions: sentiment vs. emotion in French; uczucie vs. emocja in Polish; gephil vs. emotsye in Yiddish, etc. The lay conceptions usually resemble the scientific distinctions, however among some specific groups (e.g. dog owners, vegetarians), certain secondary emotions would be attributed also to non-human species (Morris et al., 2008; Bilewicz, Imhoff & Drogosz, in press). The dimension of emotion ‘humanity’ was proved to play a crucial role in intergroup relations (for review see: Leyens et al., 2007). According to infrahumanization theory, people differentiate the ingroup from other groups by attributing uniquely human emotions. They consider secondary (uniquely human) emotions as being more characteristic of their own group than of the outgroup (Leyens et al., 2000). Such a perception of social groups is also related to intergroup behavior: secondary emotions expressed by an ingroup member increase the possibility of helping behavior, while secondary emotions expressed by an outgroup member would reduce such a possibility (Vaes et al., 2003). Castano and Giner-Sorolla (2006) reported experimental evidence that perception of ingroup responsibility for a crime committed on outgroup members would lead to lesser attribution of secondary emotions to the outgroup. Most of the studies employing the infrahumanization paradigm were performed in Western cultures, where it was proved that people agree to what extent certain emotion words would be uniquely human (Demoulin et al., 2004). In fact, the lay theory of emotion humanity seems to reflect the scientific distinctions of primary vs. secondary emotions. Thus, in addition to providing insights into the universality of emotion words, cross-cultural research on the perception of human-uniqueness of certain emotion words seems to be a prerequisite of any further studies on infrahumanization and related intergroup phenomena. Demoulin and colleagues (2004) called for research that could prove the cross-cultural universality of the lay concepts of emotion humanity – also including non-Western cultures. The present study aims to

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determine the degree to which the human-uniqueness as a key dimension of emotion perception is culturally universal – such findings could support the universality of emotion lexicons across cultures suggested by other scholars (Russel & Sato, 1995).

Selection of languages We selected three languages in a similar way as has been used in other research involving cross-linguistic studies on emotions (e.g. Russel, 1991): English-speaking group, other Indo-European language speaking group and non-Indo-European language speaking group. According to culturalist researchers, the Polish and Japanese languages are proved to differ significantly in their emotion vocabulary from the English language. Research suggests that there are Japanese emotion words that do not exist in English, like amae (Wierzbicka, 1992; Russel, 1991), while some English words (e.g. depression) differ significantly in meaning from their Japanese equivalent (yuutsu) (Tanaka-Matsumi & Marsella, 1976). Moreover, studies on facial expression have shown that at least with some emotions (anger, disgust, fear), Japanese participants made more mistakes in categorizing such emotions compared to English-speaking participants (Matsumoto & Ekman, 1989). Similar differences were observed in Polish-English comparisons. The English notion of disgust does not have a Polish equivalent (Wierzbicka, 1986), and – according to linguists – the Polish word szczęśliwy and its English equivalent happy would have different connotations (Wierzbicka, 1992). These examples – among many others – formed our rationale for using the English, Polish and Japanese languages in cross-cultural comparisons of emotion words (e.g. Russel, Lewicka, & Niit, 1989).

Study In our cross-cultural study we addressed the question of the human-uniqueness of specific emotions in the three aforementioned linguistic communities. We predicted that although the English, Polish and Japanese languages differ from one another, participants speaking these languages would agree to what extent any given emotion is uniquely human vs. animalistic and positive vs. negative. We expected that the meta-correlations between emotion-word humanity scores would provide a test of the emotion vocabulary universality in that respect.

Method Participants In total 248 students participated in the study. The Polish speakers (N=120) were university and high school students from central Poland. The Japanese speakers (N=65) were undergraduate and graduate university students in the northern area

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of Japan. The English speakers (N=63) were university students in Scotland. All the groups were of mixed gender. Procedure A total of 65 stimuli emotion words were adapted from the original list developed by Demoulin et al. (2004). Participants were individually shown the emotion list and asked to judge (on a 7-point scale) to what extent a given emotion is humanunique (“In your opinion, is the ability to experience this characteristic unique to humans or can animals also experience it?”) and to what extent it is desirable (“In your opinion, is it desirable to personally experience this characteristic?”).

Results and discussion Emotion word ratings across countries Firstly, we computed the mean emotion indices for each country (see: Appendix 1). A simple arithmetic mean was adopted. For ease of display, data is shown in the form of a radar chart (Graph 1). In the graph, each radius represents an emotion. The data length of a spoke is proportional to the magnitude of the mean emotion index for each country.

Graph 1. Human-uniqueness of emotion words in Poland, Japan and the United Kingdom (mean scores diagram)

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Measuring similarities between the countries Since the mean emotion indices in each country were measured on the same scale - thus sharing a metric and variance - the intraclass correlation coefficient (ICC) was chosen as a statistics alternative to standard Pearson’s r, allowing for measurement of homogeneity not only for pairs of measurements but for larger sets of data (McGraw & Wong, 1996). In essence, the intraclass correlation coefficient is a measure of the proportion of variance that is attributable to the objects of measurement (Shrout & Fleiss, 1979). The first step in using ICCs is to define an additive analysis of variance (ANOVA) model appropriate for the data in hand. In all situations, one systematic source of variance is associated with differences among the objects measured (in this case objects being tantamount to emotions). This object factor is always treated as a random factor in the ANOVA model. As the mean emotion indices for all the emotion words measured in each country could be computed, variability among the countries was rendered a second source of systematic variability. The third source of variability stemmed from residual error. Since the three countries could be treated as a random sample from a larger population (of countries), the country factor was considered random, and the two-way random effects model was used. Furthermore, a consistency measure was chosen over the absolute agreement measure, as the systematic variability due to country was considered irrelevant (we deemed it a cultural factor whether people are more or less reluctant to attribute emotions to others in general). Finally, because we did not want to find similarities for all the emotions together, but rather for particular emotions separately, we computed the appropriate index for single measures. Based on the model described above, the intraclass correlation coefficient was [ICC(C,1)=.659], with a 95% confidence interval ranging between LB=.537 and UB=.763. Consequently, we tested the hypothesis about the population value of ICC. In doing so, we determined whether the obtained value exceeds the medium effect size criteria set by Cohen (Cohen, 1988, p.83). The obtained F-test value when testing

Table 1. Zero-order correlations between ratings of emotion humanity in three languages (Polish, Japanese and English) Variable Polish Japanese English Note. **p < .001; N = 65

1 1 .69** .75**

2

3

1 .79**

1

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totaled F(62,124) = 1.7; p