Page 37 - CULTURE IN THE COMMUNICATION AGE

EDWARD C. STEWART

from adrenaline released into the bloodstream. The body, it was reasoned, takes
the lead, perhaps playing the only role in the experience of emotion (James
1952: 738–66).
Today it is accepted that bodily reactions play an important part in creating
and sustaining emotions. Models of the brain now show how the brain influ-
ences emotion. Scientists have demonstrated that the limbic system and
the right hemisphere of the brain are involved in mediating emotional feelings
and behavior. Even so, human feelings are too complicated to be reduced to
hormonal and neural activity. In addition to the autonomic arousal in emotion,
‘attention and scanning mechanisms are directed towards important aspects of
the environment’ and alerting and marking mechanisms identify events that are
important (Mandler 1987: 220). Cognitive evaluations of both the exciting
event and of the bodily reactions are crucial elements in mediating emotional
feelings.
In the field of cross-cultural psychology, emotions captured the attention of
the experimental psychologist Charles Osgood and his colleagues (1975), who
pioneered a massive classic study of the universals of a ffective meaning based on
single words – the Cross-Cultural Universals of Affective Meaning. Subjects from
many cultures rated a list of words used to measure their a ffective meanings. In
this way, Osgood collected information on cultural feelings towards particular
words. The hypothesis driving the study was that regardless of language or
culture, human beings throughout the world use the same qualifying emotional
framework to allocate affective meaning to concepts (Osgood et al. 1975: 6).
The study is a monumental effort to construct a universal culture of the type I
call ‘nuclear culture’.
Following in the tradition of the universal culture of emotion, the psycholo-
gist Paul Ekman identified six basic universal emotions: happiness, sadness,
anger, fear, disgust, and surprise (Ekman, Friesen and Ellsworth 1972). Each of
the six emotions has a distinctive physiological pattern among all peoples in
body temperature, blood pressure, muscle tone, body agitation, and perceptual
accuracy. The receptor organs for warmth, pressure, movement, and all the
other sensory impressions convert sensory stimulation into electric impulses
which stream to the brain, where neuronal firing is organized into a single
pattern, such as anger.
None the less, more recently Anna Wierzbicka in Emotion and Culture (1994)
confronts what she calls the ‘shallow universalism’ of the idea that a ‘ finite set
of discrete and universal basic human emotions can be identi fied by English
words’. Continuing the thought:

Cross-cultural lexical research undertaken by linguists and anthro-
pologists demonstrates that concepts such as happy or angry are not
universal, but constitute cultural artifacts of Anglo culture re flected in,
and continually reinforced by, the English language . . . Another con-
clusion emerging from this research is that the set of emotion terms

26