8.5 Emotion, Affect, and Motivation in Social Life; Cultural and Gender Influences

Emotion, Affect, and Motivation in Social Life; Cultural and Gender Influences

The Social content area lists emotion, affect, and motivation and cultural or gender influences as separate subtopics. Biological theories of emotion (James-Lange, Cannon-Bard, Schachter-Singer, LeDoux) appear in Section 3.2; here the focus is on how emotions operate between people and how culture and gender shape social behavior.

1. Facial Expressions: Universality and Display Rules

• Darwin (The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, 1872) argued that expressions evolved and are shared across species and cultures.
• Universality studies: Paul Ekman and Wallace Friesen (1971) worked with the Fore of Papua New Guinea, who had little exposure to Western media. Participants matched photographs of happiness, sadness, anger, fear, surprise, and disgust to short stories at levels similar to Western participants (fear and surprise were most often confused), and Americans could read the Fore's posed expressions. These six are often called basic emotions; contempt was proposed later as a seventh.
• Display rules: Cultural norms specify when, where, and how strongly emotions should be shown. In Wallace Friesen's (1972) study, Japanese and American students watched a stressful film. Alone, both groups showed similar negative expressions; with an experimenter present, Japanese students more often masked negative expressions with smiles.
• In-group advantage: Recognition is universal but more accurate for expressions posed by members of one's own culture (Hillary Elfenbein and Nalini Ambady's 2002 meta-analysis).
• Constructionist critique: Lisa Feldman Barrett and others argue that emotion categories are constructed from core affect (valence and arousal) and learned concepts, and that recognition rates fall when free labeling replaces forced choice.

2. Facial Feedback and Misattribution of Arousal

• Facial feedback hypothesis: Feedback from facial muscles influences emotional experience. Fritz Strack, Leonard Martin, and Sabine Stepper (1988) had participants hold a pen in their teeth (inducing a smile) or lips (preventing one) and reported that cartoons seemed funnier in the smile condition. A 17-laboratory registered replication (Eric-Jan Wagenmakers and colleagues, 2016) found no effect, and a later meta-analysis (Coles, Larsen, and Lench, 2019) found only a small overall facial feedback effect. Treat the classic pen study as a cautionary example in the replication debate (Section 14.1).
• Misattribution of arousal: Building on Schachter's two-factor theory, Donald Dutton and Arthur Aron (1974) had an attractive female interviewer approach men on the swaying Capilano Canyon suspension bridge or on a sturdy low bridge. Men on the frightening bridge wrote more sexual imagery into their stories and were more likely to call the interviewer afterward, suggesting they attributed fear-induced arousal to attraction.
• Excitation transfer (Dolf Zillmann): residual arousal from one situation (exercise) intensifies the emotional response to a later situation (provocation), producing stronger anger or attraction.

3. Mood, Judgment, and Helping

• Mood-as-information: Norbert Schwarz and Gerald Clore (1983) phoned people on sunny or rainy days. Rainy-day respondents reported lower life satisfaction, unless the interviewer first drew attention to the weather, which let them discount their mood as a cue.
• Feel good, do good: Alice Isen and Paula Levin (1972) found that people who had just found a dime in a phone booth were far more likely to help a stranger who dropped papers. Good moods increase helping (unless helping would spoil the mood), and guilt also increases helping (see negative-state relief, Section 8.4).
• Mood and processing style: Positive moods favor heuristic, top-down processing and greater reliance on stereotypes; mild sad moods favor more careful, systematic processing of arguments.
• Broaden-and-build theory: Barbara Fredrickson (2001) proposed that positive emotions broaden attention and thought-action repertoires and build lasting personal resources.
• Emotional contagion: Elaine Hatfield and colleagues described the automatic mimicry and synchronization of expressions, voices, and postures, which spreads moods between people.

4. Affective Forecasting and Hedonic Adaptation

• Impact bias: Daniel Gilbert, Timothy Wilson, and colleagues found that people overestimate how intensely and how long they will feel happy or unhappy after events such as tenure decisions or romantic breakups. Causes include focalism (thinking only about the focal event) and immune neglect (failing to anticipate how quickly we cope and rationalize).
• Hedonic adaptation: Philip Brickman, Dan Coates, and Ronnie Janoff-Bulman (1978) reported that lottery winners were not much happier than controls a year later and took less pleasure in everyday activities, while people with recent spinal cord injuries reported happiness above the scale midpoint. People adapt to many changes faster than they expect, although adaptation to some events (such as unemployment or disability) can be incomplete.

5. Social Motivation

• Need for achievement (nAch): David McClelland and John Atkinson measured achievement motivation with TAT stories (Section 13.1). High-nAch individuals prefer tasks of moderate difficulty, where success is uncertain but attainable, and seek feedback.
• Need for affiliation and power: McClelland also studied nAff and nPower; leadership success in large organizations was associated with high power motivation combined with self-control.
• Intrinsic versus extrinsic motivation: The overjustification effect (Section 7.2) and self-determination theory (Section 11.2) explain how rewards can undermine interest.
• Yerkes-Dodson law: Performance rises with arousal up to an optimum and then declines, with a lower optimum for difficult tasks.

6. Cultural Influences on Social Behavior

• WEIRD samples: Joseph Henrich, Steven Heine, and Ara Norenzayan (2010) noted that most psychology participants come from Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic societies; one review found that about 96% of samples in top journals came from Western industrialized countries housing about 12% of the world's population.
• Hofstede's dimensions: Geert Hofstede's survey of IBM employees in dozens of countries identified individualism-collectivism, power distance, uncertainty avoidance, and masculinity-femininity; long-term orientation and indulgence-restraint were added later. Harry Triandis further distinguished horizontal (equality) from vertical (hierarchy) forms of individualism and collectivism.
• Analytic versus holistic cognition: Takahiko Masuda and Richard Nisbett (2001) showed animated underwater scenes; Japanese participants described the background and relationships more, whereas Americans focused on the large focal fish.
• Culture of honor: Dov Cohen, Richard Nisbett, and colleagues (1996) had a confederate bump participants and insult them. Men raised in the U.S. South showed larger cortisol and testosterone increases and more aggressive responses than Northern men, consistent with a herding-economy honor culture.
• Cultural differences already covered: conformity is higher in collectivist cultures (Bond and Smith, Section 8.1), social loafing is weaker (Earley, Section 8.2), and the fundamental attribution error is weaker (Section 7.1).

7. Gender Influences on Social Behavior

• Gender similarities hypothesis: Janet Hyde (2005) reviewed 46 meta-analyses and found that about 78% of gender differences were small or close to zero (d ≤ .35), including math performance, verbal ability, and self-esteem. Larger differences include physical aggression (higher in males), throwing velocity and some motor skills, and some measures of sexuality; mental rotation shows a moderate male advantage.
• Aggression: Males show more physical aggression; differences in relational aggression (harming others through exclusion or rumor) are much smaller.
• Helping: Alice Eagly and Maureen Crowley (1986) found men help more in heroic, risky, short-term situations with an audience, whereas women provide more long-term caring and nurturing help.
• Social role theory: Eagly (1987) argued that gender differences arise largely from the different social roles men and women occupy (for example, caregiver versus breadwinner), which create expectations and build role-relevant skills.
• Gender stereotypes and sexism: Peter Glick and Susan Fiske's ambivalent sexism theory (1996) distinguishes hostile sexism (antagonism toward women who challenge traditional roles) from benevolent sexism (subjectively positive but patronizing views of women as pure and in need of protection). Their stereotype content model places groups on dimensions of warmth and competence.
• Androgyny: Sandra Bem's Sex Role Inventory (1974) treated masculinity and femininity as independent dimensions; people high on both were termed androgynous. Gender development in childhood is covered in Section 10.4.