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In a globalized world, in spite of cultural differences, we share, at least at the symbolic level (language level), lots of things. Considering pictures that display emotions (affect), such as those offered by the International Affective Picture System, could we speak of their 'international' character without affecting the specific and local cultural influence that might influence us in rating them?

Jeromy Anglim
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Dana Sugu
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  • From Wikipedia: "These pictures are representative of daily experiences such as household furniture ..." I'm pretty sure that household furniture is pretty varied worldwide and has no universal characteristics. So I don't understand how these images can be not culturally biased. –  Jul 08 '13 at 18:18
  • Well, there is more to IAPS than furniture. There are over 1000 pictures depicting varied categories, household furniture being one of them. – Dana Sugu Jul 09 '13 at 04:33
  • Well, sure, but how much you see around yourself (and could be photographed or drawn) is not specific to your culture? There are cultures that view beards as necessary to a man being seen as male, so you would need all males in the images to have beards -- or not, because in other countries (east Asia) beards are so uncommon as to make anyone having a beard an outsider. I really cannot imagine how images of everyday anything can have the same meaning and elicit the same emotions universally, especially not thousands of them. –  Jul 09 '13 at 07:48
  • Also, language is not universal. A famous example are color terms: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_Color_Terms:_Their_Universality_and_Evolution Affects might be universal, but everything else is culture specific, from the meaning of clothing (a burka is a sign of repression in Western countries, while a mini skirt is not a symbol of female liberation in Saudi Arabia) to social rituals (in Russia you have to decline an offer of food and will be forced until you eat; in Germany your refusal would be taken at face value and a Russian would go hungry and feel slighted). etc. etc. etc. –  Jul 09 '13 at 07:53
  • Could someone please edit the question to make it more clear? I don't understand what it means to "speak of the intentional character of something without affecting the specific and local cultural influence that might influence us in rating it". Maybe not compressing the intended meaning so much and using a few more sentences and an example might help. –  Jul 11 '13 at 07:46
  • @what Pictures in the IAPS represent snakes, badly wounded people, sexual scenes, etc. and tend to avoid highly symbolic things like your examples. I am not saying they are all completely symbol- or culture-free (whatever that could mean) but a case could be made for some universal evolutionary-relevant meaning. – Gala Jul 18 '13 at 09:27

2 Answers2

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Long story short: at least in facial affect perception/expression, there is not a definitive answer to this. The field is only just beginning to get a handle on the fact that what have been long thought of as "universal" expressions of emotion don't seem to be, so there is considerably less work on how exactly culture affects these expressions. However, current consensus is that between-group affective judgments have lower agreement rates than within-group affective judgments.

There is longstanding work from Paul Ekman suggesting that perception of six basic emotions in faces is universal (he wrote an argument for this point of view here and, more recently, here). This was based on quite a lot of work showing that participants agreed at very high rates on the emotion displayed in a set of pictures of emotionally expressive faces. However, there are methodological weaknesses in this work (there is fulltext of an excellent review on it available here). Basically, these can be summed up as a preference for forced-choice (making participants choose from a limited list of answers about the emotion on display), within-subject designs, and stimuli from Ekman's original set; when different experimental design choices are made, the agreement largely disappears.

This opens the field for suggestions that most or all affective expression is in fact culturally influenced; a more recent study here found less agreement between groups than within groups, and more agreement between groups that had more exposure to eachother than groups that had less exposure to eachother. This paper is a highly detailed answer to your question, at least as currently understood.

References:

1) Universals and cultural differences in facial expressions of emotion. Ekman, Paul. Nebraska Symposium on Motivation, Vol 19, 1971, 207-283.

2) An argument for basic emotions. Ekman , Paul. Cognition & Emotion : Vol. 6, Iss. 3-4, 1992.

3) Is There Universal Recognition of Emotion From Facial Expression? A Review of the Cross-Cultural Studies. Psychological Bulletin 1994, Vol. 115, No. 1, 102-141.

4) On the universality and cultural specificity of emotion recognition: A meta-analysis. Elfenbein, Hillary Anger; Ambady, Nalini. Psychological Bulletin, Vol 128(2), Mar 2002, 203-235.

Krysta
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    Thank you for your answer. I've reached the conclusion that 'between-group affective judgments have lower agreement rates than within-group affective judgments' by running an online experiment based on visual stimuli between 6 different cultural groups. I found interesting discussions on possible explanations of these differences in "Categorical vs Dimensional Models of Affect Panksepp and Russell" edited by Zachar P. and Ellis R.D. – Dana Sugu Jul 17 '13 at 03:46
  • I myself tend to be skeptical of overbearing claims of universalism and of Paul Ekman's theories but I don't think that “when different experimental design choices are made, the agreement largely disappears” is a fair summary of the literature. In any case, this is all a rather different question than how we perceive everyday scenes/IAPS pictures. – Gala Jul 18 '13 at 09:31
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If "we" - as global citizens - speak of their international quality it does not affect how they affect our ratings of them. Perhaps one could study responses to "International APS" versus "National APS" while presenting the IAPS in both conditions post "priming". This would determine differences in ratings, but the IAPS is first and foremost designed for emotion elicitation, that is: responses and not ratings. Those responses are species-dependent, but universal among humans.

UPDATE: In psychology "rating" and "response" have specific meanings. A response is a reaction to a stimulus, an event in the environment. For example, a stop sign makes a person stop their car. The sign is the stimulus and braking is the response. In psychological testing of humans, a field called psychometry, ratings are gathered through questionnaires. For example: "On a scale from 1 to 7, are you experiencing fear when seeing this image?". Ratings require evaluations. As such, ratings require deliberate tought. In contrast, responses can be automatic. For example, a person seeing the barrel of a gun pointed at him in an image might respond with sudden fear: the eyes open wide. In some situations we have a choice to respond with a smile if we appraise that a person should be greeted with a smile. However, sometimes we meet a friend and smile back immediately without any deliberate thought. Responses are tightly linked to the stimulus and are sometimes automatic, while ratings require deliberate judgement, sometimes through verbalization.

noumenal
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  • Thank you, but I wonder, how you make the difference between responses and ratings, when the responses are the ratings? What do I miss here? – Dana Sugu Jul 17 '13 at 03:52
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    @DanaSugu, please see my updated reply above. Ratings require a choice between responses, but there are more types of responses than ratings, but see above - I have added a distinction to the answer. I hope this helps. – noumenal Jul 17 '13 at 16:43
  • Thank you for the update. I understand the difference between the responses and the ratings. In this case, the only response was the ratings as no (neuro)physiological measurement was involved. As Jaak Panksepp (Affective Neuroscience: The Foundations of Human and Animal Emotions) puts it, in case of the ratings we look at the tertiary level, while responses take place at the primary and secondary levels. (http://emr.sagepub.com/content/3/4/387.full.pdf) – Dana Sugu Jul 18 '13 at 05:34
  • Picture selection/norms for the IAPS are entirely based on ratings (specifically SAM ratings by groups of students). How is that “designed for responses and not ratings”? Also, emotional responses can only be considered universal in a very vague sense (as in “we can in principle experience the same emotions” but certainly not “we all experience the same emotion in the same situation”). – Gala Jul 18 '13 at 09:34
  • How can one rate without responding? Ratings are conditional upon responses. Appraisal is a universal ability. Emotions are not defined on a stimulus basis, but on a response basis. Emotions are situated, but situations are not emotions. I never made the claim that "we all experience the same emotion in the same situation". I do not think Ekman did either. You might be interested in reading about appraisal theory. – noumenal Jul 18 '13 at 18:18
  • Ratings are responses, but that's a trivial point. You seem to make much of the distinction and very strongly implied that IAPS was aiming at unconscious responses, not ratings. That is just not relevant, it is based first and foremost on ratings and only afterwards used in other type of research. For the rest, I know quite a lot about appraisal theory, thank you very much; if that's not what you wanted to claim then you put it very poorly and it needed to be pointed out. – Gala Jul 19 '13 at 06:51
  • @GaëlLaurans, why did You assume that I had not read about appraisal theory? :) By using the word "can" I did not "strongly imply" that responses are always non-conscious or driven by automaticity. Ratings are always grounded in superliminal judgement. Ratings have been used to validate the IAPS - correct! But if the IAPS was not intended to elicit physiological responses, then why was Öhman on the team developing the IAPS? And why is the IAPS listed under "Emotion Elicitation" and not "Emotion Assessment" in Coan and Allen's Handbook of Emotion Elicitation and Assessment (Oxford)? – noumenal Jul 19 '13 at 07:33
  • But I did not assume you had not read about appraisal theory! Where is the “can” in the sentence “the IAPS is first and foremost designed for emotion elicitation, that is: responses and not ratings”? Stop responding to things that weren't said and pay some attention to what you are actually writing… Also the IAPS was not developed by Öhman, who mostly uses a very limited subset of the pictures (and sometimes other, non-IAPS, pictures IIRC). Furthermore this has nothing to do with the distinction between elicitation and assessment; why would elicitation be limited to physiological research? – Gala Jul 19 '13 at 07:35
  • @GaëlLaurans, I really don't want to argue about our behaviors. Let's be civil. Apparently we come from different backgrounds and I respect your perspective.

    Just read the first paragraph here: http://axess.axaide.net/sites/default/files/articles/AffectivePictureSystem.pdf

    The paper states:

    1. That the IAPS was developed by Lang and his colleagues including Öhman.

    2. The IAPS is designed to vary in arousal and valence.

    Concerning 2.), these dimensions can be defined on a physiological basis, and in my field they are, using facial EMG recordings together with, for example, Ekman's FACS.

     – noumenal Jul 19 '13 at 09:17
  • I used facial EMG in my research, that's not the issue. Arousal and valence of IAPS pictures are not defined on a physiological basis, the whole thing is based on ratings. That's a simple fact. Furthermore, in a typical psychophysiological study with the IAPS, people watch and rate a number of pictures and researchers then correlate ratings and physiological measures in some way. The IAPS is also used in studies with overt responses (e.g. response time in some categorization task) and many studies also induce mood before assessing performance of complex, deliberate behavior. – Gala Jul 19 '13 at 09:28
  • Considering all this, implying that ratings or self-report can't be used to assess the type of responses the IAPS was designed to elicit or that emotion elicitation is restricted to physiologically-defined subconscious responses is absurd. – Gala Jul 19 '13 at 09:35
  • @GaëlLaurans I agree with you that the use of introspective reports is an important approach. Subjects may and often do have conscious access to physiological processes.

    You are speaking of arousal and valence as affordances of stimuli. That perspective is a valid one, but it is not a common perspective.

     – noumenal Jul 19 '13 at 10:01
  • @GaëlLaurans Looking up "arousal" in The Oxford Companion to Emotion and the Affective Science (p.50) the first sentence reads: "... arousal refers to a short-term (phasic) increase in some process that can be viewed as involving excitatory processes—usually an increase in behaviour or physiological activity". This only demonstrates that instrument validation does not necessarily guarantee construct validation. – noumenal Jul 19 '13 at 10:02
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    I am not speaking of arousal of valence as “affordances” or in fact defending any perspective, I am just stating some basic facts about the IAPS: It is based on the idea that selected pictures can elicit broadly similar responses in most people and these responses were originally assessed with SAM ratings. Or if you want to make a distinction between perceived and experienced emotion, then the IAPS is about perceived emotion, not other affective responses (physiological or otherwise). Incidentally, there is nothing uncommon about the notion of a stimulus having a valence. – Gala Jul 19 '13 at 10:12
  • That said, how does any of this justifies the content of your answer? – Gala Jul 19 '13 at 10:13
  • The IAPS can be used for both evoking physiological responses and perceptual ratings. From my perspective, responses are involved in both scenarios, whether recorded or whether rated. Whether a researcher decides to register anything, there will be a response. That is what I meant with "first and foremost".

    Just because an instrument is validated using a certain protocol, does not imply that the instrument is designed to be used in conjunction with a similar protocol (e.g. NimStim was validated with ratings, but frequently appears in neuroscience experiments where ratings are not registered).

     – noumenal Jul 19 '13 at 10:33
  • No, but it does mean that the response is defined by these ratings, the subjective experience and deliberate rating behavior that underlie them. You can't just feign to ignore that and claim the IAPS has another aim entirely because you happen not to collect ratings in your studies. – Gala Jul 19 '13 at 10:40
  • Rating is a sufficient criterion for instrument reliability, but not construct validity. – noumenal Jul 19 '13 at 10:56
  • What does that even mean? The IAPS is not a measurement instrument… I don't think bringing even more poorly understood theoretical concepts into the discussion is useful at all. – Gala Jul 19 '13 at 11:24
  • @GaëlLaurans My final words: The IAPS is an instrument. Validity and reliability are basic concepts in psychological research methods. I am surprised that you are not familiar with them, given your dedicated interest in psychological instruments (for a discussion on what psychologists mean by "instrument" see Sturm & Ash, 2005, Roles of Psychological Instruments. History of Psychology, 8(1), 3-34. doi: 10.1037/1093-4510.8.1.3). – noumenal Jul 19 '13 at 17:11
  • I am very familiar with psychometrics and construct validity and I still don't see the relevance. Once again, you are trying to avoid backing up your points by resorting to nasty innuendo, ad hominems, obscure references and ever vaguer notions (validity and reliability are not only basic concepts in “research methods”, which is technically true but only muddles the issue as they are first and foremost basic concepts in psychometrics – not psychometry incidentally – which is about measurement). – Gala Jul 19 '13 at 18:19
  • You seem angry. I guess that you are reading in too much in what I write. I said that I respect you and that you are dedicated. You are probably right that I am obscure, vague, not backing up my points, and nasty. The IAPS was designed for ratings and I was wrong. – noumenal Jul 21 '13 at 09:15
  • I don't care much either way, I am just trying to have a discussion that you have been evading all along… – Gala Jul 25 '13 at 15:59