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Your heart pounds. Your pulse races. Your hands are damp and clammy. You experience a mild sensation of nausea. The blood drains from your stomach and rushes toward your brain, heart, and muscles. What are you feeling? You could be feeling any number of emotions— fear, anger, dread, worry—even love or excitement. This points up one of the reasons why emotions are so difficult to study. The same physical responses occur for many different emotions.
If someone showed you photographs of your own face, taken under different conditions, would you be able to name an appropriate feeling for each expression? In 1924, psychologist Carney Landis asked subjects to undergo different emotional situations in his laboratory. The stimuli, each designed to evoke a specific reaction, ranged from mild and pleasant (listening to music) to drastic and unpleasant (multiplying numbers while receiving severe electric shocks). Photographs were taken of each subject while the experiment was in progress.
A week later the participants were called back to the laboratory and asked to assume the facial expressions appropriate to the previous experimental situations. These new expressions were photographed and compared with the original ones. Landis wanted to find out how closely the assumed emotions (second set of pictures) matched the "real" expressions. He discovered that they didn't match at all!
From the first set of photographs, it was difficult to tell what the people were feeling. In examining the second set, however, there was no doubt about the emotions being expressed. Although the subjects were receiving no stimulation at all, most of their expressions were what one would expect the various test situations to produce. Landis believed that these people were expressing not what they had actually felt, but rather what they believed they ought to feel.
If Landis was right, expressions may not be responses to emotional situations, but a means of social communication. This suggests that emotions and facial expressions are learned.
However, in 1872, Charles Darwin theorized that emotional expressions are evolutionary remnants from our prehuman ancestors. For example, the facial expression of anger might have evolved from the snarling behavior of animals about to attack.
One group of researchers reasoned that if Darwin were right, that if emotional expressions are inborn or biologically programmed, then certain facial expressions should be common and recognizable to all peoples of the world, regardless of culture. They chose photographs of faces depicting happiness, sadness, anger, fear, surprise, and disgust. These were shown to people of many cultures. In all the cultures studied, the expressions were identified in the same way.
Two experiments: both seem valid but arrive at opposite conclusions. Which is right? Probably both. Probably some emotional expressions are genetically "prewired" and identifiable to all peoples. Probably many are learned as means of cultural communication.
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