Emic Facets of Emotions: Taiwanese Japanese Test

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Emic Facets of EmotionsTaiwanese - Japanese Test

• Herm Smith - UM St. Louis
• Jar-Der Luo - Tsinghua University
• Andreas Schneider - Texas Tech

SSS Presentation, New Orleans 2006
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Cross Cultural Assumptions

• Etic (universal) psychology
• Ekmans universal facial features of seven
  primary emotions
• Pan-cultural structure of emotions (Russell 1980
  Mackinnon and Keating 1989 Shaver et al 2001)

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Methods

• E(valuation), P(otency), A(ctivity) Dimensions
• 103 Mandarin Chinese translations of 99 English
  and 102 Japanese emotions words, back-translated
• analyze all 103 Mandarin stimuli and the smaller
  subset of 94 that are more clearly
  intersubjective across Asian and North American
  cultures to study whether our results are an
  artifact of somewhat different sets of emotion
  words

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View Cross-Cultural Surveyor affective meaning
software at

• http//www.indiana.edu/socpsy/ACT/SDscale.html

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CGR or Culture-Gender Ratio

• intra-cultural gender differences of both
  cultures serve as a benchmark for inter-cultural
  comparisons (Schneider 2002).
• CGR cultural differences
• CGR 1 culture differences equal to gender
  differences
• CGR 1 to infinity suggesting how much greater
  cultural differences are compared to gender
  differences.

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CGR Culture Gender Ratio
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CD Cultural Difference
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GD Gender Difference
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CGR Results

• The average CGR values range from two times
  larger for potency to 3.2 for arousal
• This indicates that taking the intercultural
  gender differences in Taiwan and Japan as a
  benchmark, the cross cultural differences are
  nearly three times as pronounced.

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Pragmatic Usage of the CGR

• If we are unfamiliar with a culture, but we have
  an idea how much different men and woman are in a
  culture we know, we can make inferences about the
  magnitude of cross cultural differences.

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CGR An Instrument for Unbiased Sociological
Focus

• While recent sociology focused on gender and in
  many cases overestimated the magnitude of
  gender-culture differences, nation-culture
  differences were often not seen in the correct
  proportion.

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Finer Grained Questions

• First, do differences in specific emotion words
  or families of emotions affect these differences?
  Are these differences due to the affective range
  of males and females in either culture? We
  explore these questions with across-gender,
  cross-cultural comparisons.

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Gender Differences

• Anger and fear are two dark families that may be
  considered the most primitive, panculturally ones
  
• Plasticity, and relative lack of
  intersubjectivity, of affect within dark and
  pleasant families may partly be due to the
  differential experiences and socialization of men
  and women

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Gender Differences

• Women express larger variation in emotion words
  signifying fear men with larger variations in
  words signifying anger and sadness
• Women express larger variation in
  happiness-related words, and men in
  security-related words

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Cross-Cultural Difference 1

• The largest overall cross-cultural difference is
  the degree to which Japanese perceive emotions to
  be more arousing than Taiwanese.
• This effect is a gendered phenomenon. While
  females show strong and highly significant
  differences of arousal across both cultures,
  differences in the arousal of Japanese and
  Chinese males are not significant statistically.

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Cross-Cultural Difference 2

• Japanese evaluate emotions much more positive
  than Taiwanese.
• Again, this is a gendered effect. This time it is
  the male population that contributes to the
  magnitude and significance of the cross-cultural
  difference.