Japan Society for the Promotion of Science:Grants-in-Aid for Scientific Research
Date (from‐to) : 2003 -2005
Author : KUBO Yukari; FUNATSU Mamoru; ANDO Kiyoshi; KITAMURA Hideya; SHIMIZU Naoji; KATSUYAMA Miyuki
In order to explore social functions of emotions, six studies have been conducted. Major findings were as follows ;
1.Negative affects have important functions of adjusting environments for human being. Anger and feeling of determination have similarities in their facial expressions. Experiment 1 showed participants indicated false recognition of photos of decision and dissatisfaction. Experiment 2 showed no differences in heart rates were observed when participants recalled unpleasant events and determination. Feeling of determination may have some relations to feeling of unpleasantness and anger.
2.A preliminary literature review was conducted to explore the psychological process of the strategies of guilt inducement. Next, 2422 advertisements contained in 72 Japanese magazines were analyzed and found that most guilt-appeals were in family- or living-magazines and seemingly intended to arouse anticipatory guilt.
3.Preschoolers were interviewed on social functions of emotional expressions. They could not explain social functions of negative emotions but positive ones. It was suggested that to understand social functions of negative emotions was more difficult than positive ones.
4.The result of this study suggests that children who developing typically pass false-belief tasks also understand the belief-based emotions gradually, but in children with autism it is quit difficult to understand the belief-based emotions and the false-belief tasks either.
5.It was revealed that the 397 synonyms of arousal in "The thesaurus of emotional expressions in Japanese" can be experienced positively or negatively or in both ways. Referring the Flow-model by Csikszentmihalyi et al., a new model on the way how arousal are experienced positively or negatively was submitted.
6.As for the human emotion, it is constructed socially in the relations with others. The emotion exists through the communication with others. Therefore, it is not only understood from the viewpoint of physiology, but also from the viewpoint of sociology and social psychology. The emotion doesn't grow at random at all, but it is being produced based on "the emotion rule" and "the emotion culture", and moreover "emotion work" and "emotion management" are being done in the relation with them.