Emotion and autonomic nervous system activity in the Minangkabau of West Sumatra.

Abstract

Physiology and emotional experience were studied in the Minangkabau of West Sumatra, a matrilineal, Moslem, agrarian culture with strong proscriptions against public displays of negative emotion. Forty-six Minangkabau men were instructed to contract facial muscles into prototypical configurations of 5 emotions. In comparison with a group of 62 Ss from the United States, cross-cultural consistencies were found in (a) autonomic nervous system (ANS) differences between emotions and (b) high configuration quality being associated with increased ANS differentiation and increased report of emotional experience. These findings provide the first evidence that these patterns of emotion-specific ANS activity and the capacity of voluntary facial action to generate this activity are not unique to American culture.

Cardiovascular costs of emotion suppression cross ethnic lines

“…Third, we used instructed suppression, a "response-focused" emotion regulation strategy, versus the types of "antecedent-focused" strategies (e.g., situation selection, attentional deployment, reappraisal) where cultural variation may be even more likely to emerge (Levenson et al, 2007). Having said this, it is important to note that cross-cultural consistencies in the realm of emotional behavior and physiology, which first came to the fore in field studies of emotional facial expressions (Ekman & Friesen, 1971;Izard, 1971) and appeared again in field (Levenson, Ekman, Heider, & Friesen, 1992) and laboratory (Soto, Levenson, & Ebling, 2005) studies of emotional behavior and physiology, continue to be the rule rather than the exception.…”

A three-component framework for empathic technologies to augment human interaction

“…Subsequently, it can be tested how well the ARMA models of different individuals predict each other. This is the approach that has been taken by, for instance, Levenson and Ruef [110]. A third way of correcting for autocorrelations was proposed by Ramseyer and Tsacher [141] by shuffling the signal from one individual to see if it still correlates with the other individuals signal.…”

“…Therefore, it is necessary to take into account signals over time. Moreover, there might be a time lag between the sender of an expression and a receiver responding to this the expression [110]. Testing for time lags can be done by comparing the signals at different lags (for instance in a range of −5 to +5 seconds) and seeing if similarity increases or decreases [143].…”

“…Predictions can be made by regressing different people's ARMA models onto eachother. [76,110] Divergence Class of stochastic dissimilarity measures, including for instance Kullback-Leibler and Cauchy Schwarz divergences.…”

The shifting basis of life satisfaction judgments across cultures: Emotions versus norms.

“…Levenson, Ekman, Heider, and Friesen (1992), for example, measured the autonomic nervous system (ANS) activity patterns between American and Indonesian (the Minangkabau) respondents after asking them to pose in various emotional expressions, such as smiling and frowning, in the absence of actual emotional situations. The two cultural groups showed essentially identical results in their ANS patterns.…”