Universality of Emotions

            Facial expressions are often seen as a reflexive result of an emotional experience. As the textbook author, Heine (2012) points out this is evident when we look at how can produce such expressions as smiling when feeling happy. It is brought to attention that people such as children, adults and even children born blind will all smile when they experience happiness. By seeing that blind children are able to smile it is clear that smiling is reflexive as these children would not be able to imitate this expression or culturally learn it. From this we can support the idea that facial expressions are a part of our biological makeup, making them a universal experience. Although people are better at identifying facial expressions of people from their culture, they are generally able to identify from other cultures as well. It has been proposed by Ekman as cited in Heine (2012) that there is a set of basic emotions that are universal, they include: anger, fear, happiness, sadness, surprise, and disgust.

            To a certain degree we can control how we express our emotions, certain cultures promote freely expressing how one feels, while other cultures stress more of a reserved facial expression to mask how one is really feeling. Here in Western cultures we are very liberal in how we display our emotions, while East Asian, in particular Japanese people are brought up to conceal their emotions in many circumstances. How we show our emotions is referred to as display rules.

            As I mentioned in a previous post, I have never travelled abroad and therefore haven’t had the chance of experiencing a culture very different from own culture here. The closest change to our culture would be when I travelled to Ottawa to live in a L’Arche home.  As I also mentioned in that early post the residents of the home were nonverbal and French. Much of communication was done through facial expressions. When you can’t receive an answer verbally you have to seek out other ways to understand the information and often I would use visual cues of emotions. So if one of the core members were to smile it was easy to infer that they were feeling happen. By having emotional reflexes as universal it is pretty easy to be able to interpret emotions. Living with 5 people who don’t talk and only understand French seemed as though it would be nearly impossible until you understand all the alternatives to spoken language.

            In instances such as my trip to L’Arche Ottawa, I am extremely grateful for the universality of emotions. Even just walking down the street some people seem much more approachable simply by the way they express their emotions, and the display rules that go along with their culture. I can only imagine that people may not seem as approachable in Japanese cultures were the display rules prompt their population to keep their emotions guarded, would they be more apt to have a flat expression, or to always smile?