Getting a feel for emotions: emotional development attracts cross-cultural explorations

Science News, Sept 19, 1998 by Bruce Bower

Videotapes of babies' facial expressions were analyzed for muscle movements previously linked to a number of emotions.

U.S. and Japanese infants expressed both positive and negative feelings with similar intensity, and they markedly exceeded the expressiveness of Chinese infants. "Smile mouths" accompanied by raised cheeks, considered a signal of happiness, occurred much more often during initial contact with an experimenter for the U.S. and Japanese groups than the Chinese. Upon being restrained or seeing the gorilla head, U.S. and Japanese babies cried sooner and exhibited more "cry mouths" than their Chinese peers.

U.S. infants produced the most instances of lowered eyebrows, perhaps related to a greater degree of distress and crying, the researchers say. Japanese infants were most likely to make midfacial movements, such as raising the upper lip, that are elements of cry faces or distaste expressions. Chinese children exhihited no striking patterns of facial movement, possibly because they had already begun to learn how to mask negative feelings, Camras' team suggests.

No one set of muscle movements was associated with all the infant reactions to procedures intended to elicit either anger and frustration or fear, the researchers assert. Infants may incorporate various facial movements into general expressions of positive and negative emotion, depending on the situation and culture, the psychologists theorize.

Cross-cultural findings based on the still-face procedure and on anger- and fear-provoking situations prove intriguing but difficult to interpret, comments Saarni. These techniques, developed in North American laboratories, may yield behaviors in Japanese and Chinese infants that look familiar to Western researchers but nonetheless have different meanings and functions in the infants' respective cultures, she notes.

The third newly published investigation, in which interviewers probed beliefs about appropriate emotional behavior among Nepalese children and their mothers, comes closer to illuminating how different cultures--even within the same nation--may promote divergent assumptions about feelings, Saarni contends.

Pamela M. Cole of Pennsylvania State University in State College and Babu Lal Tamang of Sanman Prabhi School in Tekanpur, Nepal, directed that project.

The researchers recruited one group of 27 children, ranging in age from 6 to 9, from Nepal's majority ethnic population, known as the Tamang. As Tibetan Buddhists, the Tamang cherish social equality and harmony. Differences between villagers are played down. For example, families share goods that they accumulate to avoid the appearance of an imbalance of community wealth. Consistent with Buddhist principles, the Tamang strive to avoid any strong emotions, particularly anger.

A second group of 23 youngsters in the same age range belonged to a Nepalese Hindu population, the Chhetri-Brahmin, which adheres to a social-caste system. Their daily behavior hinges on disciplined self-control according to religiously inspired rules for avoiding spiritual pollution. For instance, lower-caste people cannot touch the food or bodies of higher-caste individuals, and women cannot taste the food they cook until other family members have eaten. In this society, intense emotions are accepted as occurring from time to time, but people learn to dilute facial expressions and other signs of heightened feeling.