Following the recent progress made in genetics and epigenetics, basically all debates centering on the nature-nurture controversy have somewhat reached a general answer of accepting both biological and environmental influences on various kinds of human traits, leaving behind the disputes regarding the “relative” importance of each other. The argument between naturalist and socio-constructionist theories of emotions is one of them, as no one is really rejecting the biological foundation of our system of emotion or denying the existence of variation across different cultures.
However, as we make a critical distinction between the subjective feeling of emotions from the display or expression of emotions, a further question could be raised: does culture influence both or only one of them? In other words, we are interested in whether people in different cultures are really “experiencing” emotions differently or just “expressing” them in different ways according to some cultural-specific rules and norms, which Paul Ekman would phrase as the “display rules” (Ekman & Friesen, 1969). In this essay, I would like to argue that, while the expression of emotions is almost definitively affected by sociocultural factors, whether the subjective experience of emotions has been influenced or not remains largely unknown, mainly due to three limitations that will be introduced later in the discussion.
Plenty of researches have been conducted to examine the differences in the display rules across cultures. For example, Park et al.(2013) have suggested the differential expression of anger between American and Japanese adults, showing a negative link between social status and anger expression in America, but the reverse in Japan, probably due to their different views on authority and conceptualization of the meaning of anger expression. In another study conducted in 2009, researchers compared the variations of emotional display rules between Canada, USA, and Japan (Safdar et al., 2009). What they have found is that Japanese people tend to display significantly less powerful emotions (including anger) than those two western countries. Furthermore, they have found that there exists more variation of display rules for different interaction partners and contexts among Japanese people, potentially indicating their higher restrictions upon the expression of emotions in general.
Based on the results of numerous similar studies, we can validate the influence of cultural and social norms on the expression of emotions. Nevertheless, what about the subjective experiences? From my personal point of view, it still remains undetermined, mainly for the three reasons suggested below.
Firstly, there is always a barrier of linguistic uncertainty existing in the translation process of different languages. From a broad perspective, we cannot even be sure that the corresponding words of “emotion” refer to the same concept and have the same connotation across different languages. Even taking this as an assumption, we are still uncertain about whether each culture’s, for instance, “anger” refers to the same emotional experience or not. Secondly, as long as we are adopting a self-report methodology in investigating the subjective experiences, we will inevitably expose our data to the influence of display rules, as people’s reports might be either consciously or unconsciously biased by the social desirability. As a result, the separation between subjective experience and expression is still incomplete. Thirdly, there exists variability in appraisal and antecedent events of an emotion across cultures (Mesquita & Walker, 2003; Scherer, 1997). In other words, the same antecedent event might elicit different emotions, and the same emotion could respond to different antecedent events in different cultures. Therefore, this poses a huge challenge for researchers trying to elicit the same emotion across cultures using the same stimulus, and there does not seem to exist a better way to definitively elicit the same emotion in different people across cultures.
To conclude, although cultures have been shown to shape the ways we express our emotions, due to various kinds of limitations, their influence on our subjective feeling of emotions is still unclear. However, there is currently no better paradigm than self-report that we could apply to investigate our subjective experiences. Although the debate between these two camps will probably still continue, the distinction between subjective experiences and display rules in this essay is a critical one to be emphasized, as it could potentially reduce some of the misunderstandings resulting from the confusion of these two concepts existing in this field of research.
References
Ekman, P., & Friesen, W. (1969). The repertoire of nonverbal behavior: Categories, origins, usage, and coding. Semiotica, 1(1), 49–98.
Mesquita, B., & Walker, R. (2003). Cultural differences in emotions: A context for interpreting emotional experiences. Behaviour Research and Therapy, 41(7), 777–793. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0005-7967(02)00189-4
Park, J., Kitayama, S., Markus, H. R., Coe, C. L., Miyamoto, Y., Karasawa, M., … Ryff, C. D. (2013). Social status and anger expression: The cultural moderation hypothesis. Emotion, 13(6), 1122–1131. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0034273
Safdar, S., Friedlmeier, W., Matsumoto, D., Yoo, S. H., Kwantes, C. T., Kakai, H., & Shigemasu, E. (2009). Variations of emotional display rules within and across cultures: A comparison between Canada, USA, and Japan. Canadian Journal of Behavioural Science/Revue Canadienne Des Sciences Du Comportement, 41(1), 1–10. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0014387
Scherer, K. R. (1997). The role of culture in emotion-antecedent appraisal. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 73(5), 902–922.
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