How to see clearly through deceptive emotions | Kristen Lindquist

Summary

Kristen 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

00:00

🧠 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.

05:01

🌏 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.

10:04

🗣️ 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.

15:06

🌐 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.

Keywords

💡Emotional Experiences

Emotional experiences are the feelings and affective states that individuals go through, which can be influenced by various factors including culture. In the video, it is mentioned that these experiences can feel like irrefutable facts, shaping one's perception of the world, even though they are often a product of cultural influence.

💡Cultural Shaping

Cultural shaping refers to the influence of one's culture on their emotions, perceptions, and behaviors. The script explains that culture can shape emotions, which in turn serve as a lens for interpreting the world, emphasizing the idea that emotions are not just biological but are also a result of cultural artifacts passed down through generations.

💡Affective Realism

Affective realism is a term used to describe the phenomenon where strong emotions can bias perception, making individuals believe that their emotional state is an accurate representation of reality. The script uses this concept to illustrate how emotions can literally shape how the brain processes sensory information, potentially leading to emotion-induced biases.

💡Shooter Bias

Shooter bias is an example of how heightened emotions, particularly fear, can lead to misperceptions of threats. The script mentions this as a classic example where people under high cardiovascular intensity are more likely to misinterpret objects as guns, highlighting the impact of emotional states on perception.

💡Emotion Bias

Emotion bias is the tendency for an individual's emotional state to influence their judgment and perception. The script discusses how being aware of one's emotions can help check for biases, suggesting that emotions can shape whether one sees the presence of a threat, as in the case of shooter bias.

💡Individualism and Collectivism

Individualism and collectivism are cultural dimensions that describe the importance of the individual versus the group. The video script contrasts these concepts, explaining that in individualistic cultures like the United States, emotions like anger are expressed to assert individuality, whereas in collectivist cultures, emotions serve to maintain group harmony.

💡Physiological Response

Physiological response refers to the physical reactions of the body to emotional experiences. The script uses the example of anger to illustrate how different cultures can have distinct physiological responses to the same emotion, such as the difference in inflammation levels between the U.S. and Japan.

💡Gender and Emotion

Gender and emotion explore the cultural and biological expectations and stereotypes associated with the emotional expressions of males and females. The script points out that while there are biological predispositions, cultural norms significantly influence how emotions are perceived and expressed, leading to disparities in diagnoses and emotional expectations.

💡Authenticity

Authenticity in the context of the video refers to the alignment of one's self-perception and emotional expression with societal norms and expectations. The script suggests that checking how the world should see us versus how we actually feel can lead to a more authentic self-expression, which can be liberating and reduce stress from societal pressures.

💡Basic Level Categories

Basic level categories are fundamental concepts in language that are acquired early in language learning and represent fundamental distinctions, such as 'dog' or 'anger.' The script discusses how the English language's basic emotion categories may not be universal, affecting how emotions are understood and communicated across cultures.

💡Facial Expressions

Facial expressions are movements of the facial muscles that can communicate emotional states. The video script challenges the assumption that facial expressions are automatic and reflexive signals of internal states, showing that cultural biases can influence the interpretation of these expressions, as demonstrated by the 'Resting Bitch Face' example and cross-cultural perception studies.

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.