VV064 Week 7
1) Read the following statements about how people respond to other people and situations in
their lives. Work in pairs and discuss how far you agree with at least two of the statements. Give
reasons and examples.
a) People are generally concerned with how others think, feel, and act, and all the more so
in emotional setting.
b) In individualistic cultures, the cultural task of the individual is to seek out, achieve, and
maintain independence from others.
c) In collective cultures, the cultural task of the individual is one that focuses on
interdependent attributes, such as relatedness to others, and the rights, duties,
obligations, and responsibilities that are involved in these relationships.
d) When asked how one feels at present, people respond in accordance with their own
unique feelings which are the outcomes of appraisals (evaluations) of different situations
and events.
2) Skim the text and decide which of the following statements is a suitable summary.
a) The text looks at how people evaluate emotions and emotional situations depending on
whether they belong to an individualistic or collective culture.
b) The text explores how people in individualistic cultures relate to and respond to each
other in emotional situations.
3) Where do you think the text comes from? Select from the following and give reasons.
a) a textbook on linguistics
b) a textbook on psychology
c) a beginner’s guide to sociology
4) Scan the text for the following phrases. Explain what they mean in your own words and then
compare with a partner.
Social appraisal, self-image, individualistic (culture), collective (culture), independent-based (culture),
interdependent-based (culture)
5) Match summaries a and b with two paragraphs in the text.
a) The authors compare two types of cultures, namely individualistic and collective cultures. In the
former the emphasis is on personal qualities that distinguish the individual from other people in
society. In the latter, the individual is integrated into society and shares group responsibilities.
b) The authors believe that people’s judgments in their lives influence emotion in all cultures. The
reasons is that people are influenced by others, but by how much depends on each culture, with the
differences in the way self is seen by individualistic and collective cultures. This, in turn, may affect
social appraisal.
VV064 Week 7
Cultural significance of social appraisals
We assume that social appraisals, i.e. evaluations or judgments of events and situations that
people encounter in their life, play a role in the emotion process in all cultures. This is because
people are generally concerned with how others think, feel and act, and all the more so in emotional
settings. However, cultures are likely to differ in the extent to which they explicitly value social
appraisals. It is by now well established that cultures differ with respect to the way in which self is
perceived and this may impact on the importance and strength of social appraisals. A currently
influential way of thinking about the differences between cultures, in terms of their impacts on selfimage,
which in turn can be related to Triandis’s (e.g. 1989) distinction between individualistic and
collective cultures.
In individualistic cultures, the cultural task of the individual is to seek out, achieve, and
maintain independence from others. The characteristic self-image in such a culture is one that
focuses on internal attributes, such as ability, personality, preferences, and aspirations; attributes
that set the individual apart from other persons. The self is seen as a separate entity, clearly distinct
from others. In collective cultures, the cultural task of the individual is one that focuses on
interdependent attributes, such as relatedness to others, and the rights, duties, obligations, and
responsibilities that are involved in these relationships. The self is seen as a connected entity, not
clearly separated from relationships with others. Culturally based variations in the way self is
perceived are therefore likely to influence the way emotions and emotional situations are appraised.
Evidence consistent with these arguments comes from recent research by Bagozzi, Wong,
and Yi (in press). Drawing on the notion of independent-based and interdependent-based cultures,
they proposed that culture and gender interact to produce different patterns of association between
positive and negative emotions in memory. Specifically, they expected that positive and negative
emotions would be negatively associated in independent cultures and positively associated in
interdependent cultures. The reasoning underlying this prediction is as follows: in independent
cultures there is a tendency to differentiate the self from others and to perceive attributes of
persons (such as emotions) as discrete categories; in interdependent cultures, by contrast, the self is
seen in relation to others and to social context, and emotions and other attributes of the individual
are seen neither as a way of differentiating the self from others nor as a basis for social action.
Bagozzi and colleagues also predicted that these cultural differences would be greater for
women than for men, as a result of women’s greater knowledge and skill in dealing with emotions.
Comparing American and Chinese respondents’ reports of how intensely they felt each of a number
of emotions “right now,” the investigators found good support of their predictions. For example,
intensity measures of joy and negative emotional response were negatively correlated for American
men and women (but more strongly so in women than men), whereas they were unrelated in
Chinese men and positively related in Chinese women. It seems, then, that the way in which self is
perceived in independent and interdependent cultures can have quite a profound effect on the way
in which emotional response is represented. Bagozzi and colleagues interpret these findings in terms
of appraisal processes: “When asked how one feels at present, people respond in accordance with
their own unique feelings which are the outcomes of appraisals of different situations and events.
People will differ in intensity of felt emotional response but will interpret this in the light of their
cultural world views and knowledge of their own emotions.”
VV064 Week 7
Complete the following with these words:
After, already, but, did, equation, fate, half, however, in the end, it, mathematics, not, questions, so
(2x), such as, therefore, these, this (2x), to, where, whether, which, without
I decided to try and write a popular book about space and time (1) _______________ I gave the Loeb
lecture at Harvard in 1982. There were (2) _______________ a considerable number of books about
the early universe and black holes, ranging from the very good, (3) _______________ Steven
Weinberg’s book, The First Three Minutes, (4) _______________ the very bad, (5) _______________
I will not identify. (6) _______________ , I felt that none of them really addressed the (7)
_______________ that had led me to do research in cosmology and quantum theory: (8)
_______________ did the universe come from? How and why did (9) _______________ begin? Will
it come to an end and if (10) _______________ , how? (11) _______________ are questions that are
of interest to us all. (12) _______________ modern science has become (13) _______________
technical that only a very small number of specialists are able to master the (14) _______________
used to describe them. Yet the basic ideas about the origin and (15) _______________ of the
universe can be stated without mathematics in a form that people (16) _______________ a scientific
education can understand. (17) _______________ is what I have attempted to do in this book. The
reader must judge (18) _______________ I have succeeded.
Someone told me that each equation I included in the book would halve the sales. I (19)
_______________ resolved (20) _______________ to have any equations at all. (21)
_______________ , however, I (22) _______________ put in one equation, Einstein’s famous (23)
_______________ , E=mc2
. I hope that (24) _______________ will not scare off (25)
_______________ of my potential readers. (Steve W. Hawking: A Brief History of Time)