Reading emotions
Do Australian people express emotions in much the same way as Chinese people? Or are there distinct patterns in styles of communicating and interpreting emotion, as different as languages?
Major variations do exist, but they are more comparable to dialects than to languages. So psychologists call them 'emotional dialects'.
Emotions are the same in Sydney as in Shanghai because they are grounded in biology - or so the prevailing wisdom goes. But the processes of learning to control emotions, express them and perceive them in others are subject to local cultural conditions.
Some argue there is a universal quality to broad dimensions of emotion - such as arousal and valence (feelings of attraction or aversion). These are distinct from more specific emotional categories, such as anger and surprise, which are probably the most susceptible to cultural variation.
The most basic facial expressions of emotion are anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness and surprise, say psychologists who reviewed research covering 42 countries and 23 ethnic groups. The most easily recognised across cultures are happiness (especially in the face) and anger (especially in the voice). This could be because recognising happiness and anger shows a healthy, naturally selected attunement to signals of approachability and avoidance.
There are odd exceptions. The Bahinemo people of New Guinean, for instance, were studied at a time when they had had no previous contact with westerners. They saw all American faces as angry.
In regional terms, Europeans and Americans are better at recognising American expressions of emotions than are Asians or Africans. But why is this? Is it a matter of cultural learning, expressive style, differences in emotional concepts, cognitive representations?
Part of the answer may lie in the differences between languages; some languages may be better equipped to express certain groups of emotional concepts than others. This view is rooted in the theory that language and thinking are mutually influential.
It goes like this. Over time, Inuit people have invented more words for snow than, say, the inhabitants of Guangzhou. The subsequent benefactors of this vocabulary are then influenced by it. They actually see many more different types of snow because their language provides them with the tools to do so. The same goes for Englishmen and rain.
So, do some languages have more words for anger than others? Certainly, different emotional concepts infuse the words used to describe emotions in various languages. But this does not explain things entirely, because emotional dialects have been found among groups that share the same native language. For example, English, Scottish, Irish, New Zealanders, and Australians are not as good as Americans are at judging emotions expressed by other Americans.
Picking up on other people's emotions is incredibly fine-tuned. In some cases, cultural outsiders have great difficulty decoding recorded vocal expressions alone. But the pattern is not consistent: One study showed no evidence of differing emotional dialects between American and Japanese adults, while another showed distinct biases in understanding among Chinese and white children.
Emotional dialects must be learned either by growing up in a culture or being exposed to it later. Outsiders residing in Hong Kong, and Hongkongers who have a lot of exposure to foreigners, are likely to get better at recognising emotions across cultures. Interestingly, the effect is asymmetrical: power dynamics within groups seem to push minority group members to understand the nonverbal emotional cues of majority members, while there is less evidence of the reverse.
Emotions, then, do seem to lose some of their meaning across geographic, national, cultural and even social boundaries such as class and status - but they never lose all their meaning. So linguists find evidence for both universal and culturally specific elements in language and thinking patterns. Just as spoken dialects influence a language and its use, emotional dialects subtly colour the manner in which emotions are shown and understood.
Therefore, living in a multicultural city like Hong Kong is just the ticket to learn a few new dialects.
Jean Nicol is a psychologist specialising in issues of cultural identity and change in an era of globalisation