Final Report

Emotions

Background

Many emotions are universal and people from one background should be able to identify a facial expression of an emotion made by someone of a different culture.

There are six basic emotions that most everyone can recognize: Happiness, Surprise, Anger, Fear and Disgust. These can also be referred to as Universal Emotions. Emotions are not simple. Fear -- one of the Universal Emotions -- for example, can be like an instinct -- fear of cliffs, snakes, and spiders -- things that used to be very dangerous to our ancestors. Fear can also be learned as in the fear of cars -- something much more dangerous than a spider or a snake. Depending on genes, you may be predisposed to great fear while others experience less fear. Experiences we have may also effect how afraid we are of one thing or another. If you were attacked by a dog as a child, you may be afraid of dogs even as you grow older because of your experience. Anger (also Universal), is very complicated. Many things, large and small, can cause anger. Venting anger is commonly said to relieve it, but studies prove that it may do the opposite by adding to fuel to the fire. There are a couple of suggested ways to deal with the anger without "blowing up" and those are releasing it through exercise or by just waiting it out. By waiting, the anger will settle down and eventually go away. And a final example of how emotions are not simple: Happiness. Happiness is probably our favorite emotion. It makes us more willing to help others -- a very consistent fact. Not much is ever said about the most abundant emotion, happiness, however, some research has been done to delve deeper into this emotion as well as other complicated Universal and non-Universal emotions.

Facial expressions are a way to express emotion, but that's not all they do. Facial expressions can also amplify that emotion and cause us to feel tat way somewhat. By smiling you may become slightly happier and by' frowning, slightly more upset. An example is a suggestion to help relieve the stress of a hard day. Try to smile as big as you can using all the muscles in your face -- squint your eyes and show some teeth. Often, your mood lightens up and you can become more cheerful.

The six emotions mentioned before and the facial expressions that accompany them are universal. No matter what culture you come from, you will make a similar facial expression as someone from a culture different from yours when feeling the same emotion. The amount we express the emotions we have or how often we experience them can differ from culture to culture, however, regardless of whether they're Universal Emotions or not. For example, Asian cultures may experience more sympathy, respect and shame tan cultures in the West. Still, emotions will carry wit them similar traits from one culture or background to another.

Procedures

When I started the project, I chose two people to pose for photos. I told tem to imagine a time when they actually experienced the emotion that I gave them and ten try to re-create the expression tat matched. I had both of the individuals in the same room together and before I started shooting photos, I made a list of the emotions. I started the picture taking with Anne. I asked her to make the face tat went with the first emotion on my list. I took tee picture and then asked Megan to do the same thing with the last emotion on my list. The pictures of Anne were of emotions in order from the top of my list to the bottom and the pictures of Megan worked from bottom to top. Why would I do that? I thought that by having them in the same room, it could cause a problem if they did the same facial expressions following each other. I was afraid that it might cause them to mimic one another instead of giving me their true facial expression. I wanted to avoid this, so I arranged it so that they would never do the same emotion one after the other.

After gathering and labeling the pictures I took, I chose five people -- two adults and three teenagers (which was not on purpose) -- to evaluate the photos. To each guessing person, I gave a sheet of paper listing the emotions represented and three emotions that were not used. I told them that three emotions on the list were to distract them from the emotions I used. Then I asked them to match the emotions on the list to the emotions displayed on the photos.

After collecting that data, I chose two people who had not been here in the United States very long (other cultures/backgrounds) and asked them, in the very same way, to match the emotions to the pictures. I took the data from both sets of people and made it into two tables to represent it.

Evaluation

As I pulled my data together, I noticed that my hypothesis was right in the respect that people from other cultures could, in fact recognize the Universal Emotions as well as those people from the same culture as the people in the photos. However, I also expected to see that those other cultures would have a hard time recognizing the tougher, more vague emotions. I was wrong. In fact, the people from the other cultures could identify these more quickly than the same-culture group.

This can be easily seen in the following charts, but can also be seen in Table I and Table 2.  

As I look back now, I see that my choices my have skewed my data in this way. When I chase my subjects, I may have made many mistakes. I chose strictly women (on accident) to represent the other cultures. Women have been shown in a recent study to pick out subtleties of emotion much quicker than men can. This may partially, if not fully, account for the results against my hypothesis. Also, my subjects of whom I took pictures were both female teenagers. This may have changed the outcome due to the lack of representation of adults and males. Three of my subjects who picked out emotion/picture matches were teenagers and actually averaged a higher percentage of correct guesses than the adults. This is an unexpected side effect that has left me wondering if adults have a harder time recognizing teen facial expressions than other teens. These factors as well as many others that have gone unnoticed have changed my outcome and I'm sure it wouldn't be the same way if these factors were changed.

For Next Time.

If I were to do this again, I would go one of two ways:

1. I would do the whole study over in nearly the same way only changing the factors I mentioned in the Evaluation. I would choose four people to make the facial expressions. I would be sure to chose one teenage female, one teenage male, one adult female and one adult male. Then, I would choose six people who were of the same background as the four subjects to match emotion to facial expression. They would be teenage female, adult female, older adult female, teenage male, adult male, and older adult male. I would be sure not to have the four picture sitters in the same room at the same time.

2. I would explore this adult/teenage phenomenon. Can teenagers read emotions of their fellow teens better than adults can? My hypothesis is, "Yes, they can read their peers better than anyone else," and that sounds almost obvious. Still, I can't help but wonder if that seemingly obvious fact is really true. If I were to delve into this piece of the topic my procedure would differ in many ways. First of all, I would choose two teens, one male, and one female, to demonstrate their facial expressions in front of the camera. Then, I would find four people, two adults and two teens to match emotion to facial expression. Of the adults, one would be female and one would be male. Likewise with the teenagers. After collecting the data from both the adults and teens, I would pay close attention to the percentages of correct answers of each. Hopefully I would find that my hypothesis is correct -- that teens really can read their peers better than adults.

Whatever way I took, I would probably be surprised by my results and later find that my choices, large and small, made huge impacts on my study just like the discussions I made in this study dramatically affected my result.