Final Report

Emotions: Universal or Learned Phenomena

Introduction

An emotion is a response of the whole organism, involving physiological arousal, expressive behaviors, and conscious experience. In this experiment I concentrated on the expressive behaviors part of an emotion, mainly facial expressions. The question that I hoped to answer as a result of this experiment was, "Are facial expressions made when a

person is having a universal emotion, or are they learned through experience and culture?". A universal emotion would be an emotion most people would be able to identity regardless of their culture or background.

Hypothesis

From the research that I have conducted, I hypothesized that the first six emotions I chose are universal. These six emotions included fear, anger, happiness, sadness, disgust and surprise. Robert Ekman and Wallace Friesen conducted an experiment where they showed six photographs of six different emotions (including disgust, anger, fear, happiness, sadness, and surprise) to people all over the world. They found that, for the most part, people were able to identity these six emotions regardless of their culture. Charles Darwin, another renowned psychologist, speculated that humans used facial expression to communicate their emotions in prehistoric times before the use of language. He believed that this is why basic human emotions can be identified all over the world. Caroll Izard studied the facial expressions of young infants and found that they also were able to express their emotions through facial expressions.

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I hypothesized that the other four emotions I chose are not universal emotions, but rather are taught within cultures and through a person's experiences. These four emotions included love, hate, confused and annoyed. Although every culture experiences these emotions, they express them in many different ways. Because of this, I hypothesized that these four emotions would be harder to recognize than the other six emotions I was using in this experiment.

Methods

To conduct my experiment, I first took ten pictures of two different people which included one picture of each emotion (fear, anger happiness, sadness, disgust, surprise, confused, annoyed, love, and hate), for a total of twenty pictures. The first person who I took pictures of was a white female. The second person was a biracial male (black and Puerto Rican). Next, I chose five people to identity these emotions. For the first attempt, the person was shown the pictures one at a time without any labels. For the second attempt, all twenty pictures were laid out in front of the person so they could see them all at once. Again, the person had to name the emotions without any labels. Finally, for the third attempt, the person had all twenty pictures laid out in front of them, but this time they were also given labels. After I gathered all the data, I formulated four tables to organize my findings and come up with a conclusion.

I formed some questions about my experiment while putting it together. How does gender affect the way people express or identity emotions? Does race play a role in how we express or identity emotions? Does age play a role in the way one expresses or identifies certain emotions? For this experiment, I planned to use a variety of different ages, races, and genders to help answer these questions. Of the three different ways of presenting the facial expressions in this experiment, will one be easier to identity than the other (I believe having all the pictures in front of the person with labels will produce more right answers than the other two attempts.). Since the two people in the twenty photographs were "posing" the emotions, would the results be different if I included a group of photographs that were not posed, but rather taken in a real life situation (a surprise photo). Should I include a group of pictures that are real life situations?

From this experiment I hoped to conclude that the six emotions, fear, anger, happiness, sadness, disgust, and surprised, are universal emotions. I also hoped to conclude that the emotions of love, hate, confused and annoyed are learned and therefore are harder to pick out from a group of facial expressions. While conducting this experiment, I also hoped to answer the questions within the previous paragraph. Findings

The tables show the data that I collected during this experiment.

Interpretation of Data

According to the data I collected during this experiment, I have made the following conclusions.

( With the pictures being shown one at a time, the universal emotions were chosen right 15% of the time versus the learned emotions which were chosen right only 7.5% of the time.

( With the pictures being shown all at once without labels, the universal emotions were chosen right 42% of the time versus the learned emotions which were chosen right only 17.5% of the time

( With the pictures being shown all at once with labels, the universal emotions were chosen right 45% of the time versus the learned emotions which were also chosen right 45% of the time.

( All together, the universal emotions were chosen right 37.5% of the time versus the learned emotions which were only chose right 21.5% of the time.

( I decided to choose three "surprise", real life pictures to show the five participants also. These three pictures included surprise, angry and annoyed. The surprise and angry pictures were chosen right 100% of the time while the picture of annoyed was chosen right only 15% of the time. This also supports the hypothesis that there are universal emotions and that there are culturally learned emotions.

Conclusion

According to these findings, we can assume that my hypothesis is true. The universal emotions, which included happiness, sadness, fear, anger, surprise, and disgust, were picked right more often than the culturally learned emotions, which included confused, annoyed, love and hate. However there was an exception. People were able to guess the categories of love 80% of the time and hate 100% of the time with the female model when labels were provided. I believe that this is due to the fact that in a lot of cultures, women are taught to show there emotions, especially that of love and hate more often than men, which answers the question does gender play a role in reading and showing emotions. According to this study, yes it does.

Also, people were able to pick out the right emotion more often when labels were provided, than when labels were not provided. According to this experiment, there are a lot of different varieties ( different shades) of emotions. For example, when the pictures were shown one by one or all at once without labels, a lot of people named the hate emotion as angry. Once they had labels and realized that there was an angry and a hate emotion, they were able to determine the difference in the two (a quote from one of the participants "hate is a bigger form of anger that can be seen in the eyes"). I also found that there were two different pairs of emotions that were very similar. The participants got these emotions backwards more than half the time. These emotions were annoyed and disgusted, surprised and fear.

There are some things that I would do different next time. The first thing would be to have better pictures that were not so bright, and also do a more close up picture of the models face. I would also Like to concentrate more on the question if race is a significant factor in reading emotions. To do this I would have four sets of pictures, one of a white female, one of a white male, one of a black female and one of a black male. Then if time would permit, have a set of pictures from a Latino model and an Asian model. Then I would have a lot more participants of all kinds of ethnic backgrounds.

Another thing I would do is follow up more on the love and hate emotions. To find out more if the results are really due to the difference of being male or female in certain societies. Maybe, love and hate should also be considered universal emotions.