Ideal Affect: Cultural Causes and Behavioral Consequences

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Abstract

Most research focuses on actual affect, or the affective states that people actually feel. In this article, I demonstrate the importance and utility of studying ideal affect, or the affective states that people ideally want to feel. First, I define ideal affect and describe the cultural causes and behavioral consequences of ideal affect. To illustrate these points, I compare American and East Asian cultures, which differ in their valuation of high-arousal positive affective states (e.g., excitement, enthusiasm) and low-arousal positive affective states (e.g., calm, peace-fulness). I then introduce affect valuation theory, which integrates ideal affect with current models of affect and emotion and, in doing so, provides a new framework for understanding how cultural and temperamental factors may shape affect and behavior.

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Core affect and the psychological construction of emotion.

James A. Russell (2003)

At the heart of emotion, mood, and any other emotionally charged event are states experienced as simply feeling good or bad, energized or enervated. These states--called core affect--influence reflexes, perception, cognition, and behavior and are influenced by many causes internal and external, but people have no direct access to these causal connections. Core affect can therefore be experienced as free-floating (mood) or can be attributed to some cause (and thereby begin an emotional episode). These basic processes spawn a broad framework that includes perception of the core-affect-altering properties of stimuli, motives, empathy, emotional meta-experience, and affect versus emotion regulation; it accounts for prototypical emotional episodes, such as fear and anger, as core affect attributed to something plus various nonemotional processes.

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Communication of emotions in vocal expression and music performance: different channels, same code?

Patrik Juslin, Petri Laukka (2003)

Many authors have speculated about a close relationship between vocal expression of emotions and musical expression of emotions. but evidence bearing on this relationship has unfortunately been lacking. This review of 104 studies of vocal expression and 41 studies of music performance reveals similarities between the 2 channels concerning (a) the accuracy with which discrete emotions were communicated to listeners and (b) the emotion-specific patterns of acoustic cues used to communicate each emotion. The patterns are generally consistent with K. R. Scherer's (1986) theoretical predictions. The results can explain why music is perceived as expressive of emotion, and they are consistent with an evolutionary perspective on vocal expression of emotions. Discussion focuses on theoretical accounts and directions for future research.

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Universals and cultural differences in the judgments of facial expressions of emotion.

P Ekman, W Friesen, M. O'Sullivan … (1987)

We present here new evidence of cross-cultural agreement in the judgement of facial expression. Subjects in 10 cultures performed a more complex judgment task than has been used in previous cross-cultural studies. Instead of limiting the subjects to selecting only one emotion term for each expression, this task allowed them to indicate that multiple emotions were evident and the intensity of each emotion. Agreement was very high across cultures about which emotion was the most intense. The 10 cultures also agreed about the second most intense emotion signaled by an expression and about the relative intensity among expressions of the same emotion. However, cultural differences were found in judgments of the absolute level of emotional intensity.