Language and Organisation of Filipino Emotion Concepts: Comparing Emotion Concepts and Dimensions across Cultures

Guilt, shame, and embarrassment: similar or different emotions? A comparison between Italians and Americans

Introduction

Guilt, shame, and embarrassment represent affective experiences with social implications and diverse self-relevant negative affect. While the distinction between these emotion terms has been extensively investigated, little is known about how they diverge and are related to each other and their crosscultural differences.

Methods

Here, we used a community sample (N = 163) comprised of Americans and Italians and a scenario-based measure in which we asked participants to report the intensity of emotions that the story's main character would feel. The elements used to build the scenarios were based on a recent theoretical approach that proposes distinguishing cognitive, somatic, interoceptive, and behavioral ingredients to differentiate between these emotions. We hypothesized that these ingredients might effectively elicit the target emotions and that the main differences across these cultures would be associated with the emotion terms of shame/vergogna.

Results

Our findings suggest that these defining elements are effective in evoking experiences of guilt, shame, and embarrassment. Moreover, we found that shame was equally elicited by the Shame and Guilt Scenarios only in the American sample, thus suggesting a proximity between shame and guilt in the American sample compared to the Italian's terms of vergogna and colpa.

Discussion

These results suggest important implications for the psychology of moral emotions and highlight the importance of taking into account some cognitive factors, such as the quality of self-evaluation, the discrepancy between the actual self and the ideal self vs. the sense of perceived responsibility, and the different domains related to self-esteem.

Religious Affiliation and Conceptions of the Moral Domain

What is the relationship between religious affiliation and conceptions of the moral domain? Putting aside the question of whether people from different religions agree about how to answer moral questions, here we investigate a more fundamental question: How much disagreement is there across religions about which issues count as moral in the first place? That is, do people from different religions conceptualize the scope of morality differently? Using a new methodology to map out how individuals conceive of the moral domain, we find dramatic differences among adherents of different religions. Mormon and Muslim participants moralized their religious norms, while Jewish participants did not. Hindu participants in our sample did not seem to make a moral/non-moral distinction of the same kind. These results suggest a profound relationship between religious affiliation and conceptions of the scope of the moral domain.

An ISBD perspective on the sociocultural challenges of managing bipolar disorder: A content analysis

OBJECTIVE

Clinical management of bipolar disorder patients might be affected by culture and is further dependent on the context of healthcare delivery. There is a need to understand how healthcare best can be delivered in various systems and cultures. The objective of this qualitative study was to gain knowledge about culture-specific values, beliefs and practices in the medical care provided to patients with bipolar disorders from a provider perspective in various areas of the world.

SAMPLING AND METHODS

The International Society for Bipolar Disorders (ISBD) network provided the framework for this qualitative study. An electronic interview with open-ended questions was administered to 19 international experts on bipolar spectrum disorder representing the International Society for Bipolar Disorders chapter network in 16 countries and six continents. In addition, there were two in-depth interviews with bipolar spectrum disorder experts done prior to the survey. The data were analysed using content analysis, and the information was structured using the software NVivo by QSR International Pty Ltd.

FINDINGS

All participants described sociocultural factors as important in healthcare delivery to bipolar patients in their part of the world, both in accessing healthcare and in providing culturally appropriate care. Factors that affected the provider's ability to supply good clinical management of patients were access to treatment options and long-term follow-up, as well as general strategies to combat stigma. In some societies, the patients' use of alternative treatments, gender issues and religion were also important factors. Understanding the impact of such culturally specific factors was overall regarded as essential for proper treatment interventions.

CONCLUSION

Sociocultural factors clearly affect the nature and quality of medical services delivered to bipolar patients. Financial, social and cultural factors affect patients' health-seeking behaviour, and this highlights the need for knowledge about such factors in order to adequately identify and treat bipolar patients globally. Culturally adapted training and psychoeducation programmes are particularly warranted.

Self-Described Traits, Values, and Moods Associated with Individualism and Collectivism

The authors tested individualism-collectivism (I-C) theory by comparing self-described traits, values, and moods of students in individualistic (U.S., n = 660) and collectivistic (Philippine, n = 656) cultures and in students within these cultures varying in individualism and collectivism. They also examined the cross-cultural generalizability of factor dimensions derived with Hui’s I-C measure. U.S. and Philippine students’ selfdescriptions of their personality traits, valued traits, general values, and moods generally differed in ways predicted by I-C theory. However, in comparing individualistic and collectivistic students within the two cultures, the U.S. results conformed more consistently to I-C theory than did the Philippine results. The cross-cultural comparability of the I-C factor dimensions was fair at best.

The Structure And Personality Correlates Of Affect In Mexico

The structure and personality correlates of affect were studied in a sample of 351 predominantly Mexican university students using a large and representative list of 271 Spanish affect terms and a Spanish translation of the Big Five personality dimensions. Results were compared with those obtained previously in the United States, the Philippines, and Estonia. We found (a) good support for the cross-cultural comparability of global Positive Affect (PA) and Negative Affect (NA) dimensions and the hierarchical structure of affect; (b) cross-cultural similarities, but also differences, in the configuration of more specific positive and negative affects; and (c) fairly comparable patterns of relationships across cultures between the Big Five dimensions of personality and the Big Two dimensions of affect (PA, NA). Most of these results were more consistent with evolutionary biological perspectives on personality and affect than strong social constructivist perspectives.

Scaling laws in emotion-associated words and corresponding network topology

We investigated whether scaling laws were present in the appearance-frequency distribution of emotion-associated words and determined whether the network constructed from those words had small-world or scale-free properties. Over 1,400 participants were asked to write down the first single noun that came to mind in response to nine emotional cue words, resulting in a total of 12,556 responses. We identified Zipf's law in the distribution of the data, as the slopes of the regression lines reached approximately -1.0 in the appearance frequencies for each emotional cue word. This suggested that the emotion-associated words had a clear regularity, were not randomly generated, were scale-invariant, and were influenced by unification/diversification forces. Thus, we predicted that the emotional intensity of the words might play an important role for a Zipf's law. Moreover, we also found that the 1-mode network of emotion-associated words clearly had small-world properties in terms of the network topologies of clustering, average distance, and small-worldness value, indicating that all nodes (words) were highly interconnected with each other and were only a few short steps apart. Furthermore, the data suggested the possibility of a scale-free property. Interestingly, we were able to identify hub words with neutral emotional content, such as 'dog', 'woman', and 'face', indicating that these neutral words might be an intermediary between words with conflicting emotional valence. Additionally, efficiency and optimal navigation in terms of complex networks were discussed.

Lexical Studies of Filipino Person Descriptors: Adding Personality-Relevant Social and Physical Attributes

Lexical studies have focused on traits. In the Filipino language, we investigated whether additional dimensions can be identified when personality-relevant terms for social roles, statuses, and effects, plus physical attributes, are included. Filipino students (N = 496) rated themselves on 268 such terms, plus 253 markers of trait and evaluative dimensions. We identified 10 dimensions of social and physical attributes-Prominence, Uselessness, Attractiveness, Respectability, Uniqueness, Destructiveness, Presentableness, Strength, Dangerousness, and Charisma. Most of these dimensions did not correspond in a one-to-one manner to Filipino or alternative trait models (Big Five, HEXACO, ML7). However, considerable redundancy was observed between the social and physical attribute dimensions and trait and evaluative dimensions. Thus, social and physical attributes communicate information about personality traits, and vice-versa.