Deck 12: Universals and Cultural Differences in Emotions

Question 1

What was the primary focus of early cross-cultural emotion psychology research?

A)A search for universal emotions
B)A search for evidence that emotion is a linguistic construct
C)A search for evidence that Westerners are emotionally superior to people from other cultures
D)A search for solutions to cross-cultural emotion misunderstandings

Answer 1

A

Question 2

Research by Ito, Masuda, and Li (2013) tested the prediction that people from what type of culture process group scenes holistically, allowing the facial expressions of background figures to influence their judgments about target facial expressions?

A)Homogeneous cultures
B)Heterogeneous cultures
C)Collectivist cultures
D)Individualist cultures

Answer 2

C

Question 3

Which of the following statements about collectivist cultures' display rules is true?

A)The expression of emotion should be generally suppressed, especially around ingroup members, so as to maintain group harmony
B)The expression of negative affect should be greater around ingroup members than outgroup members, as a sign of respect
C)Emotion suppression is cognitively costlier for people in collectivist cultures than individualist cultures
D)Both A and B
E)All of the above

Answer 3

A

Question 4

Matsumoto (1990) proposed that display rules in individualist (American) and collectivist (Japanese) cultures should depend on whether people are interacting with ingroup or outgroup members. According to Matsumoto, which cultures would be most likely to express emotion in which context?

A)Americans should endorse expressing more negative emotions to outgroup members compared to Japanese participants
B)Japanese participants should endorse expressing more negative emotions to outgroup members compared to Americans
C)Americans should endorse expressing more positive emotions to outgroup members than to ingroup members; Japanese participants should endorse the opposite
D)Americans should endorse expressing pro-social emotions to any individual regardless of group identity, while Japanese participants should reserve the expression of pro-social emotions for outgroup members

Question 5

Which of the following statements about cultures of honor is not true?

A)People's self-esteem is dependent on their and their family's public reputation
B)Insults or threats to a person's honor often incite aggression
C)The American south, some South American countries, and some Mediterranean countries are cultures of honor
D)Both A and B are true
E)All of the above are true

Question 6

What term describes Daoist, Buddhist, and Confucianist teachings about good and bad, which is thought to influence how people think about their emotions?

A)Optimizing
B)Dialectical
C)Harmonizing
D)Relativist

Question 7

If you come from an optimizing culture, which of the following best describes you?

A)You strive to maximize positive emotions and minimize negative ones
B)You strive for an optimal balance between positive and negative emotions
C)You accept negative experiences as a part of life and are aware of the fleeting nature of positive experiences
D)You believe negative experiences are a way to exhibit one's virtue and moral superiority

Question 8

Think back to the stereotypes people in Western cultures have about men and women's emotional and social roles. What construct from cultural psychology best describes traditionally feminine emotional and social attributes?

A)Heterogeneous
B)Homogeneous
C)Collectivist
D)Individualist

Question 9

What is one consequence of an optimizing view of positive emotions?

A)An increased tendency to use the midpoints (rather than the endpoints) of self-report mood measures
B)A reduced tendency to value positive emotions, compared to other cultures' views
C)An increased tendency to mention negative features and consequences of positive emotions, like happiness
D)A reduced tendency to report experiencing mixed emotions-that is, feeling both positive and negative emotions in a single situation

Question 10

Researchers made Asian Canadian participants more aware of either their Asian or their North American identities, and then looked at the relationship between their self-reported positive and negative emotions. What was the effect of the cultural identity manipulation on positive and negative affect?

A)They reported more positive emotions overall when their Asian identity was made salient
B)They reported more intense emotions, both positive and negative, when their Asian identity was made salient
C)Their reports of positive and negative affect were unaffected by the cultural identity manipulation
D)Their reports of positive and negative affect were positively correlated only when their Asian identities were made salient

Question 11

What theory of culture and emotion emphasizes the importance of ideal affect in determining which activities and goals people pursue?

A)Affect Valuation Theory
B)Dialect Theory
C)Historical Heterogeneity Hypothesis
D)Self Concept Theory

Question 12

What value in Western culture leads people to seek high-arousal forms of positive affect (e.g., excitement) as opposed to low-arousal positive affect (e.g., calm feelings)?

A)Individualism
B)Honor
C)Ideal affect
D)Heterogeneity

Question 13

What do Rychlowska and colleagues (2015) mean when they say a culture is homogeneous?

A)The culture does not have much economic disparity
B)Most of the culture's population has a shared heritage, rather than being composed of different immigrant populations
C)The culture encourages emotional transparency and has a limited number of display rules
D)The culture is relatively ""new"" and is therefore lacking a shared history of tradition and norms

Question 14

Each of the following choices includes two sets of values or norms, which may best describe cultures of individualism or collectivism. Which of the following pairs of descriptions is not listed in this order: Individualism; Collectivism?

A)The goal to express and discover one's uniqueness; the goal to maintain connections, fit in, and perform a role
B)Behavior reflects one's inner personality and attitudes; behavior reflects social norms and roles
C)Personal achievement and fulfillment, as well as rights and liberties, are what matter; group goals and solidarity, as well as social responsibilities and relationships, are what matter
D)Promote communal relationships; promote exchange relationships
E)All of the above are ordered correctly

Question 15

Magda is a researcher who wants to test whether the expression of anger is influenced by the desire to express one's uniqueness versus the desire to fit in and perform one's role. Which culture construct best fits her interest?

A)Individualism-collectivism
B)Homogeneity-heterogeneity
C)Culture of honor
D)Dialectic-optimizing

Question 16

One cultural dimension studied by psychologists is the degree to which people define the Self in relation to, and as interdependent on, others. What is this dimension called?

A)Homogeneity-heterogeneity
B)Individualism-collectivism
C)Dialectic-optimizing
D)Expressivity dialect

Question 17

Sievers and colleagues had participants alter features of an animated red ball to test for universal emotion expression features in what two modalities?

A)Posture and expression
B)Movement and music
C)Language and music
D)Movement and dance

Question 18

What human behavior do Snowdon and colleagues believe has evolved from the communication of emotion in animals?

A)Music
B)Speech
C)Gesture
D)Kissing

Question 19

Why did Levenson, Ekman, Heider, and Friesen (1992) ask members of the Minangkabau tribe in West Sumatra to pose various facial expressions?

A)To see if people from other countries would be able to recognize the basic facial expressions when they were produced by unfamiliar faces
B)To see if people from pre-industrial cultures know how to produce basic facial expressions
C)To see if the facial feedback would cause systematic changes in their physiology similar to the changes observed in North American subjects
D)To see if posing different facial expressions would lead the subjects to behave in emotion-congruent ways, according to the predicted action tendencies for each emotion
E)All of the above

Question 20

Tsai and Levenson (1997) measured the physiological states and self-reported affect of East Asian and European American couples while they discussed a topic of conflict. What did they find?

A)East Asians self-reported less intense emotions than European Americans, but no differences were found in physiology between cultures
B)European Americans had more intense self-reported emotions and physiological changes compared to East Asians
C)Physiological changes and self-reported emotions during the discussion did not differ across culture
D)European Americans reported more negative emotions overall and had greater physiological arousal compared to East Asians

Question 21

Nummenmaa and colleagues (2014) used a computer-based, topographical self-report method called emBODY to create heat maps of what body parts people associate with various emotions and emotion stimuli. What can we conclude from this study?

A)Each culture studied generated its own unique heat map, suggesting language drives the conceptual understanding of emotion experience
B)Europeans tended to associate emotions more with the head and East Asians tended to associate emotions with the body
C)There was cross-cultural agreement in the heat maps for self-conscious emotions, but not for basic emotions
D)The heat maps generated for each emotion were consistent across the cultures sampled

Question 22

What is an emotion expression dialect?

A)Emotion expression ""accents"" shared by groups of people and that are the result of cultural learning
B)The exchange of emotion expressions that emerges within interpersonal situations
C)An individual's unique way of expressing emotion that does not seem to be culturally inherited
D)The exaggerated versions of facial expressions that people use when interacting with outgroup members

Question 23

What observed phenomenon in cross-cultural emotion recognition does the dialect theory attempt to explain?

A)Differences in eye gaze patterns when looking at positive versus negative emotion expressions
B)A nearly universal preference for looking at majority group members' faces
C)Universality of emotion experience
D)The ingroup advantage
E)All of the above

Question 24

What relationship between climate and emotion was first proposed by Charles de Secondat Montesquieu in 1748, and later tested by Pennebaker and colleagues (1996)?

A)People from tropical climates should be less emotionally expressive than people from temperate climates because it is generally too hot to make big movements
B)People from southern regions should be more emotionally expressive than northerners because cold temperatures limit muscle mobility
C)People from regions with extreme weather should be more independent and less expressive because they spend most of their time indoors, not socializing
D)People from warm climates are likely to develop a homogeneous culture that involves reduced emotional expressivity

Question 25

Scherer and colleagues (1988) asked participants from ten countries to describe common situations, or antecedents, that elicited joy, sadness, anger, and fear. What did they find?

A)All four emotions were elicited by a wide range of antecedents that varied greatly across cultures
B)Fear, being a basic emotion, was elicited by the same antecedents regardless of culture, but there was more variability across culture for the other emotions
C)As predicted by the universality hypothesis, they found that the same basic antecedents were associated with each of the four emotions, regardless of culture.
D)They found that social antecedents for all four emotions were more commonly reported by Americans and Europeans than for the Japanese participants

Question 26

What does the universal contingency hypothesis say about appraisal dimensions?

A)The relationship between an appraisal and the subsequent emotion is contingent on the individual's culture
B)There are certain universal situations or stimuli that elicit a set pattern of appraisals in all people
C)If two people make the same appraisal of a situation, they will have the same emotional reaction to it, regardless of their cultures of origin
D)All of the above

Question 27

Mauro, Sato, and Tucker (1992) investigated how appraisal dimensions were related to the experience of 14 different emotion states using participants from the U.S., Japan, China, and Hong Kong. What did they find?

A)In support of the universal contingency hypothesis, they found cross-cultural agreement in the relationship between all studied appraisal dimensions and the 14 emotions
B)There was universal agreement about the appraisals associated with the basic emotions studied (e.g., anger), but for the other, secondary emotions (e.g., embarrassment), there was virtually no cross-cultural agreement regarding the associated appraisals
C)There was little cross-cultural variability in the relationship between more primitive appraisals (e.g., pleasantness) and emotions, but cross-cultural variability when it came to more cognitively demanding appraisals (e.g., anticipated effort)
D)There were strong associations between appraisal dimensions and social emotions in th East Asian samples, but not in the U.S. sample

Question 28

Imada and Ellsworth (2011) studied attributions for success and failure in American and Japanese participants. What did they find?

A)Americans were more likely to take personal credit for their success than were the Japanese participants
B)Americans were more likely to blame their failures on others or the situation than were the Japanese participants
C)Overall, the Japanese participants reported a greater tendency to experience pride than the Americans
D)Both A and B
E)All of the above

Question 29

How do historically heterogeneous and homogeneous cultures differ in their expression of emotion?

A)Heterogeneous cultures tend to discourage the expression of negative emotions and self-focused emotions more than homogeneous cultures
B)Heterogeneous cultures tend to endorse greater emotional expressivity and produce more recognizable emotion expressions than people from homogeneous cultures
C)People from heterogeneous cultures are worse at recognizing the emotion expressions of people from other cultures
D)Both A and B
E)All of the above