7.1.4.1 Antecedents of emotions.

Research on different aspects of emotion has generally supported the universality of these related constructs. Antecedents of emotion refer to the events or themes that elicit the emotion. For example accomplishing important personal or group goals may elicit happiness. When people are frustrated from the blockage of goal attainment the emotion is often anger. Sadness occurs from the loss of a loved one or loss in something fundamental to our lives. Disgust can occur in relationships with others or from self-evaluation when we are repulsed by our own behavior or that of others. Fear occurs from specific objects or events that threaten well-being and about which we are helpless. More complex emotions like shame, contempt or surprise also have distinct elicitors that derive from self-evaluation, moral superiority, and sudden or novel stimuli.

Scherer (1997a, 1997b) conducted a large scale study that involved nearly 3000 participants from 37 countries. The respondents were asked how they felt when they last thought about the six basic emotions after which these subjective feelings were coded into broad antecedent categories. The results showed the same antecedent categories producing basic emotions occurred in all cultures and that culture-specific events were not required in order to code the antecedents. The researchers also found concordance in the relative frequency that antecedent events produced specific emotions. Happiness was frequently a product of relationships with other people in all cultures. Relationships also played role in anger when associated with injustice, and sadness in relationships lost due to death.

Boucher and Brandt (1981) asked respondents in Malaysia and the United States to identify the situations that produced the basic emotions. A total of 96 elicitors of emotion were collected. When U.S. participants were asked to rate the antecedents and identify the corresponding emotions they correctly identified the antecedents. This was the outcome regardless of whether the emotion situations were produced by the Malaysian or American respondents. This research was later replicated using different cultural groups (Brandt & Boucher, 1985). Informers from the U.S., Korea and Samoa were asked to write about situations that produced the basic emotions of happiness, sadness, anger, disgust and surprise. The stories that were produced subsequently had all cultural referent material removed and were then presented to the respondents. The results showed that the antecedents of emotions were similar in all three samples. However, as might be expected some cross-cultural differences remained where cultures have different cognitive interpretations of the emotion eliciting situations (Mesquita et al, 1997). For example, in some cultures aspects of the supernatural are more salient and may cause fear reactions whereas these antecedents are not present or less salient in other societies.

7.1.4.2 Vocalization and intonation in emotional expression.

People use intonation to emphasize subjective feelings and as an indication of the intensity of emotional involvement. Do intonations follow universal rules so different language speakers can still recognize emotional meaning in the language of other speakers? In one study (McCluskey, Albas, Niemi, Cuevas & Ferrer, 1975) the researchers used a brief phrase in Dutch expressed in nine different emotional tones that included disgust, surprise, shame, joy, fear, contempt, sadness, anger, and a neutral tone. The vocal expression was used in a comparison between Dutch, Taiwanese, and Japanese respondents. In nearly all cases the various emotions were recognized at better than chance level from the intonation alone. The Dutch sample did respond at a higher level of recognition suggesting that some information loss occurred from linguistic differences between the three samples.

Other studies have yielded similar results to those found for facial recognition of emotions. In one study (Albas, McCluskey, & Albas, 1976) speech samples were collected from English and Cree language speakers that expressed emotions of happiness, sadness, love and anger. Using an electronic filter the expressions were made unintelligible semantically leaving the intonation intact. Results showed that speakers from both language groups recognized the emotions expressed, although recognition was better in their own language. These results would appear to lend some support to the universality of emotional intonation, although also a supporting role for cultural linguistic information.