How to see clearly through deceptive emotions | Kristen Lindquist
Summary
TLDRKristen Lindquist, a professor of psychology and neuroscience, explores the neural and cultural underpinnings of emotions. She discusses how emotions, shaped by culture, act as lenses through which we perceive the world, often leading to biases. Lindquist emphasizes the importance of recognizing emotional diversity across cultures and the role of gender in emotional expression, advocating for an open-minded approach to better understand and connect with others.
Takeaways
- 🧠 Emotions are powerful and can shape our perception of reality, serving as a lens through which we interpret the world.
- 🌐 Cultural influences significantly shape our emotional experiences, suggesting that emotions are not solely biological but are also cultural artifacts.
- 🧬 While there is a biological basis for emotions, with all humans possessing the 'hardware' to create emotions, the specific emotions one experiences are largely a product of their culture.
- 🧠 The brain is a predictive organ, creating a model of the world based on learning and experiences to anticipate future events, which can be influenced by emotional states.
- 🚨 Emotion-induced biases can affect perception, such as the 'shooter bias' where heightened cardiovascular intensity leads to misperceiving objects as threats.
- 🤔 Being aware of our emotions and their consistency with the context can help us check for emotion bias and interpret situations more accurately.
- 🌍 Emotions are not universal and can vary greatly across cultures, affecting how individuals perceive and respond to different emotional states.
- 🧍♂️🧍♀️ Collectivist and individualistic cultures have different impacts on how emotions like anger are experienced and expressed, with different physiological responses.
- 💔 Gender biases in emotion expression can lead to misdiagnosis and different societal expectations for emotional expression in men and women.
- 🤝 Recognizing and respecting the diversity in emotional experiences can foster more authentic connections and a broader understanding of the human experience.
- 🗣 Language plays a significant role in how we categorize and understand emotions, with cultural differences affecting the meaning and expression of emotional states.
- 😐 Facial expressions are not always a veridical representation of internal feelings and can be misinterpreted due to cultural biases about emotion expression.
Q & A
What is the term used to describe the phenomenon where emotional experiences feel like they are the truth of the world around you?
-The term used is 'affective realism'.
How does culture influence our emotions according to Kristen Lindquist?
-Culture shapes our emotions, which in turn act as a lens for interpreting the world around us.
What is the role of emotions in ensuring our survival from an evolutionary perspective?
-Emotions are believed to have evolved to help ensure our survival in a world filled with threats, such as predators.
Why are emotions considered cultural artifacts?
-Emotions are seen as cultural artifacts because they are passed down from one individual to the next over time, similar to art, religion, and language.
How does the brain's predictive nature relate to our emotional experiences?
-The brain creates a model of the world based on learning and experiences, and this model influences how we perceive and react emotionally to situations.
What is the 'shooter bias' and how does it relate to emotional experiences?
-The 'shooter bias' is a tendency for people under high cardiovascular intensity to misperceive objects as threatening, like guns, due to strong emotional arousal.
How can we check for emotion-induced biases in our perception?
-We can check for emotion-induced biases by being aware of our feelings and evaluating if they are consistent with the context of the situation.
What is the difference between individualistic and collectivist cultures in terms of emotions?
-Individualistic cultures emphasize personal thoughts, beliefs, and emotions, whereas collectivist cultures value the group and derive self-worth from being part of that group.
How does the experience of anger differ between the United States and Japan according to the script?
-In the United States, anger is associated with an increase in inflammation and is about asserting individual rights, while in Japan, anger signals a disruption in group harmony and the need to mend bonds, without a robust increase in inflammation.
Why do cultural norms and gender expectations impact emotional experiences and expressions?
-Cultural norms and gender expectations shape how individuals perceive and express emotions, which can lead to stress and self-doubt if one's emotions do not align with societal expectations.
How does the language we use to describe emotions influence our understanding of them?
-The language we use can shape our emotional experiences by influencing how we categorize and interpret our feelings, which can vary significantly across different cultures.
What is the significance of the facial expressions in communicating emotions across cultures?
-Facial expressions are not universally understood and can be culturally specific, leading to potential misunderstandings of emotions when people from different cultures interact.
Outlines
🧠 Emotional Perceptions and Cultural Influences
Kristen Lindquist introduces the concept of emotional realism, where emotions can be so powerful that they distort our perception of reality. She explains that emotions are not only personal but also shaped by cultural factors, with the brain serving as a predictive organ that uses past experiences to anticipate future events. This can lead to biases, such as the 'shooter bias,' where heightened emotions lead to the misperception of threats. Lindquist emphasizes the importance of recognizing our emotions and their consistency with the context to avoid biases.
🌏 Cultural and Biological Bases of Emotion
This paragraph delves into the cultural and biological underpinnings of emotions. It contrasts individualistic and collectivist cultures, highlighting how stress and anger manifest differently in the United States and Japan. The paragraph also touches on gender biases in emotional expression and their impact on health outcomes. Lindquist points out that while there is a biological basis for emotions, cultural norms and language play a significant role in shaping emotional experiences and their interpretation.
🗣️ Language and the Expression of Emotions
The third paragraph explores the relationship between language and emotion, challenging the assumption that basic emotions are universally experienced and categorized similarly across cultures. It discusses the variability in emotional language and how it can lead to misunderstandings in emotional communication. The paragraph also addresses the cultural differences in facial expressions and their interpretation, illustrating the influence of cultural biases on our perception of others' emotions.
🌐 Embracing Cultural Diversity in Emotional Experiences
In the final paragraph, Lindquist emphasizes the importance of recognizing and embracing the diversity in emotional experiences across cultures. She suggests that acknowledging the distinctness of each person's psychology and avoiding the imposition of our own biases can foster better connections and understanding. The paragraph concludes by highlighting the potential benefits of diverse perceptions for problem-solving and understanding the world.
Mindmap
Keywords
💡Emotional Experiences
💡Cultural Shaping
💡Affective Realism
💡Shooter Bias
💡Emotion Bias
💡Individualism and Collectivism
💡Physiological Response
💡Gender and Emotion
💡Authenticity
💡Basic Level Categories
💡Facial Expressions
Highlights
Emotions are powerful and can distort perception, serving as a lens through which we interpret the world.
Kristen Lindquist discusses the neural and cultural basis of emotions at the University of North Carolina.
Emotion studies have roots in medicine and anthropology, reflecting a historical tension between biological and cultural perspectives.
Emotions are believed to have evolved for survival, helping the brain to predict and respond to threats.
Cultures shape emotions, which in turn affect perception, similar to how cultural artifacts are passed down.
While all humans have the biological basis for emotions, the specific emotions experienced are largely a product of culture.
The brain is a predictive organ, creating models of the world based on past experiences and emotions.
Emotion-induced biases can affect perception, such as misperceiving objects as threats during heightened emotions.
Cultural differences in emotions are significant, with varying interpretations of anger, sadness, and fear across cultures.
Individualistic cultures like the U.S. view anger as a signal of personal violation, while collectivist cultures view it as a disruption of harmony.
Stress and its effects can differ across cultures, with unique physiological responses to the same emotions.
Gender influences emotional expression and perception, with cultural expectations superimposed on biological sex.
Language plays a crucial role in how emotions are categorized and understood within different cultures.
Not all languages have words for emotions like 'fear' or 'surprise', indicating cultural differences in emotional expression.
Facial expressions are not always automatic and can be influenced by cultural norms and expectations.
Cultural biases can lead to misinterpretations of facial expressions and emotional states.
Personal experiences of cultural differences in emotional expression and the impact on perception.
The philosophical concept of 'other minds' problem and its relation to understanding emotions across cultures.
Recognizing individual psychological differences can foster more open-mindedness and better cross-cultural connections.
Diversity in emotional perceptions can contribute to a broader understanding of the world.
Transcripts
- Powerful emotions feel like irrefutable facts.
They wash over us, take over our bodies,
and change our perceptions.
We call this:
where your emotional experiences
feel like they are the truth of the world around you,
when in reality, the culture that we live in
is, in a sense, shaping your emotions
and your emotions are then serving as a lens
for interpreting the world around you.
And the notion that people could be thinking
and feeling something that is completely different
from what we would think or feel in that context
is, frankly, kind of scary.
But understanding that people
don't necessarily have the same emotional mind as us
could really open our eyes
to how it is that we're perceiving interactions
in day-to-day life.
I'm Kristen Lindquist,
and I'm a professor of psychology and neuroscience
at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill,
and I study the neural and cultural basis of emotion.
The study of emotion has really come
from sort of two intellectual lineages over time:
One is medicine and the other is anthropology
and the study of culture,
and as a result, to this day,
psychology still kind of pits
these two different perspectives against one another.
Ultimately, what our brain is doing,
on a moment-to-moment basis, is try to keep us alive,
and many scholars have suggested
that emotions actually evolved in order to keep us alive;
to ensure our survival in a world that was filled with bears
and tigers and big animals that were trying to eat us.
Cultures evolve too.
Emotions are like cultural artifacts.
They're things that are passed down over time
from one individual to the next,
like art and religion and the language that you speak.
Now, I should clarify, this is not to say
that there isn't a biological basis for those things.
All humans are born with the basic hardware
that helps the brain create emotions,
but which emotions a person experiences
are very much a product of their culture.
So your culture is shaping your emotions
and your emotions, in turn,
are shaping your perception of the world.
So the brain, ultimately, is a predictive organ.
What that means
is that it's trying to create a model of the world around it
based on learning and prior experiences,
and use that information to make best guesses
about what's going to happen next.
And the experiences that you've had,
which are very much nested in culture,
can trickle down to the operation of single neurons
that are processing visual sensations
in the world around you.
So in the moment when you're experiencing a strong emotion,
you have this instance of affective realism
and that is coloring how it is that your brain
is literally picking up the information
that it's taking in from your eyes and your ears
and all of your other senses.
And so in that sense,
we can have these emotion-induced biases
whereby what you're feeling is literally shaping
whether you see the presence of a threat.
A very classic example of this
is something called a 'shooter bias.'
When people are under particularly high
cardiovascular intensity,
they tend to misperceive objects
as things that are threatening, like guns.
So one thing that we can do to check our emotion bias
is to be aware of what we're feeling
in any given point in time.
And to also check in and think,
"Is this feeling consistent with the context?
Does this feeling actually make sense
given what's going on around me?"
It's important to understand
that emotions are not universal across cultures.
There's important differences in what it means to feel angry
or sad or fearful,
and one of the most prominent focuses of this work
has been on cultures that are high
in what's called
Many Western, industrialized cultures
are cultures that are high in individualism;
where you really seek to see yourself
as an individual who has their own thoughts,
their own beliefs, their own emotions, and so on.
Now, collectivist cultures are, in many ways,
opposite to this
in the sense that who you are doesn't really matter so much-
and you derive value, and a sense of self even,
from being a part of that group.
It's interesting that even the effect of stress
seems to have a slightly different impact on people
in cultures around the world.
As a case in point,
in the United States,
anger is about making yourself different
from the people around you,
it's about showing that some sort of violation has occurred,
setting a line in the sand and saying,
"You did something wrong to me."
And when individuals in the United States experience anger,
we see an increase in inflammation.
Too much inflammation,
too much stress ends up creating things
like cardiovascular disease and many other disorders.
In Japan, anger does not show
a robust increase in inflammation.
In Japan, anger is a signal
that harmony in the group has been disrupted,
and a signal to mend bonds.
A different physiological response
to the same exact emotional experience.
Culture very much defines who we are,
who we see ourselves as, who we want to be,
and people talk a lot in biology
about biological sex differences,
and this topic certainly comes into play
when thinking about emotions.
People think that in mammals,
females are caregivers and males are not
and that, as a result, this has entrained the brain
over the course of biological evolution
to be more emotional, perhaps, in females of the species
and less in the males.
However, it's also the case that our cultures bring to bear
a lot of top-down information with regards to gender-
and this gendered information
is imposed onto biological sex.
So women are perceived as overly emotional in many cultures,
to the extent that women who go to the hospital,
for instance, with heart palpitations
are often diagnosed as having anxiety
as opposed to heart attacks.
Women die of heart attacks more frequently
when admitted to the ER.
Whereas boys are expected to be relatively stoic
or, if they express emotions,
to have strong, dominant emotions,
such as anger or pride.
The result is that at the level of the individual,
if you're not meeting the norms of your society,
if you feel out of sync with those norms,
then that can cause a lot of stress and self-doubt
and feeling like you are somehow different
from people around you,
when in reality there's actually far more variation
in the emotions that people experience, of both genders,
than the sort of stark gender differences would suggest.
So if we took a second and checked how it is
that we think the world should see us,
as opposed to how we actually want to see ourselves
or how we actually feel ourselves to be,
then that might open up some avenues
for people to feel more authentically like themselves.
Much can be learned from the language that people use
to describe emotions.
We have taken for granted, in the science of emotion,
for really decades now, that people around the world
experience the emotion categories
that we as English speakers think
are the sort of central emotion categories of life.
And these are what in language
are called:
Basic level categories
are those that new language learners acquire first,
so for instance,
when you are learning to differentiate animals,
you differentiate dogs and cats and birds,
you don't differentiate terriers and Siamese, and robins,
and in very much the same way,
emotion categories such as anger and sadness
and fear and disgust are basic level categories in English.
Now, on the one hand, people have argued,
"Well, language is just the tool that's used
to communicate the experience."
Yet, enough research has been done over time
to suggest that the words do have different meanings
in ways that are important culturally.
The evidence suggests
that only about 22% of languages around the world
have a word that is roughly similar
to the English language word "fear,"
and really only 13% have a word that is equivalent
to the English language word, "surprise."
So one thing that people often question
when they hear these types of statistics is,
"Well, what does it mean
for a culture not to have a word like fear?"
Fear itself seems so basic, so critical to our survival
and surely people from cultures around the world
experience threats
and experience their hearts beating quickly
when their lives are in danger.
And that is not in question.
The question is, how it is that their brains
are making meaning of those instances,
and experiencing them as something separate
from other types of mental states.
And there's some evidence
that in some small-scale cultures, in particular,
emotion words just aren't that central
to how it is that individuals are making meaning
of their own internal lives
and the internal lives of others.
Instead, they focus much more on the behavioral actions
that are accompanying situations.
The result is that we can misunderstand
what others are feeling
because of the language that they're using
to describe their states.
In much of the early theorizing about emotion,
it was assumed that facial muscle movements
were automatically triggered means
of signaling somebody's internal state to other people.
The theory has progressed on this over time
to suggest that it may be that people are communicating
what they feel with their facial expressions,
but not automatically and reflexively,
in much the same way that they would use language.
I will use the term, "Resting Bitch Face" as an example
of people misperceiving what it is
that somebody is experiencing when a woman, in particular,
has a relatively flat, slack face,
people assume that she is mean or grumpy.
I always note
that there is no corresponding "Resting Jerk Face" for men,
but that also has to do with our cultural biases
about who should be experiencing which emotions when.
There's some nice work that has been done
using computer graphics to randomly display an avatar's face
and randomly move its facial muscles,
and so participants from China saw a movement of an eyebrow
or a wrinkling of the lip
that Western perceivers did not see.
In the U.K., there were facial muscle movements
associated with an emotion like anger
that were not perceived to be associated
with that emotion category in China.
So there's a fair amount of variability
in which specific facial muscle movements
are associated with different categories.
And what's really critical to understand
is that the signals that people make with their face
need not give some veridical representation
of what it is that they're feeling,
but secondly, that we are imposing our own cultural biases
onto people's facial muscle movements.
A case that comes to mind occurred when I was in Japan,
and I was in a place
where a lot of foreigners didn't typically visit
and I was sitting in a cafe by myself
and tried to put a finger on why it was the case
I was feeling so uncomfortable,
and I suddenly realized that nobody was looking at me.
I was sticking out like a sore thumb,
as this foreign white woman, sitting in this suburban cafe
and not a single person was paying attention to me,
trying to figure out why I was there, who I was-
and I realized that in the United States
it would be very typical to feel curious,
to, you know, give somebody a smile,
to make them, you know, feel more welcome perhaps,
or even just indicate that you noticed
that they were unique.
And in Japan, that very much goes against the grain
of the culture.
It is rude to stare at somebody.
I realized that my cultural frame
was influencing my emotional experiences
and how I expected others
to be having emotional experiences.
This all comes down to something
which in philosophy is called:
which is that we can never truly understand
the content of other people's minds.
And yet, when we encounter people
from different cultures in daily life,
even within our own cities,
people who come from different regional backgrounds
or have different religious backgrounds
or even have different political identities,
it can be stressful to encounter other cultures
and realize that something is just a little bit out of sync.
If you recognize that everybody's psychology
is a little bit distinct,
and that you are perhaps imposing your own bias onto things
and have more of an open mind
about trying to learn what somebody is feeling,
instead of assuming,
then there's more avenues for connections across groups.
Each person is bringing to bear, really,
something that is unique,
a unique angle on the world around them
and, ultimately, this diversity in perceptions
could lead us to better answers
about how it is that the world works.
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