The Interactive View of Emotions
The Interactive View of Emotions is the model that focuses on the influence of different social, cultural factors on our emotional experiences. Two components that are involved in this model are Feeling Rules and Emotion Work.
Feeling Rules influences how we should feel in a particular situation, such as funerals, marriages, etc. These feelings are dependent on our own cultural values. For example, Western culture differs from Asian cultures over the issue of individuality v. interdependency. Western culture emphasizes individuality by allowing people to feel proud of their own accomplishments. However, within the Asian cultures, people are taught to embraced group identity. In other words, people understand that personal achievements reflect off from family or community efforts.
Cultures differ in their interpretation of emotions. Death, love, anger, and others are some of the emotions that are represented differently among many, different cultures.
Death: “’Social Shaping of Grief’”
--“African tribes celebrate death because it means the individual is journeying to a better form of life.”
--“Buddhists believe in the individual taking on other forms in the afterlife (reincarnation).”
Anger: “’Cultural Codes For Anger’”
--“Western society believes it is healthy to express anger, instead of keeping in inside.”
--“The Semis of Malaysia believes that anger is bad luck because and angry person always gets hurt.”
--“A community in New Guinea create ways to vent aggression by ‘“running amok.”’”
Feelings Rules not only allow cultural values to control people’s emotional expressions, but contribute to allowing people to have privilege to express negative emotions towards people with little or no power.
In companies or industries around the world, it has been observed that employees in lower rank positions tend to be the scapegoats of negative emotions such as anger or frustration. People with higher power can get away with taking out their frustrations on people with lower power because they have the power to control the employment, benefits, environment, and much more. “’Who do you think would be a target or a scapegoat: Servers or restaurant mangers, flight attendants or pilots, receptionists or CEOs?’”
One last dimension that contributes to different, cultural values is the feeling rules that families socialize their children. Deep acting teaches children to “feel grateful for gifts and not feel angry when a sibling takes a toy.” In other words, they internalize the rule of controlling what they should feel and not feel. However, with surface acting, children are taught to “say ‘thank you’ when they receive a gift and should not attack a sibling who takes away a toy.” Therefore, children internalize controlling external emotional expressions, not internal emotions.
Emotion work is the last factor that contributes to the Interactive View of Emotions. It is basically the work and time we put into how we should feel in certain situations. The time that we are most aware that emotion work plays role is when we experience the “‘pinch’.” The “ ‘pinch’” occurs when you can’t resist feeling happy when someone you dislike is having bad luck. To avoid this inappropriate feeling, emotion work can come into play by making efforts to feel sad. There are other ways that we may be vulnerable to the “‘pinch’.” Since people are learning about emotional expressions from their cultural values and beliefs, it may be difficult for people who are “socialized in multiple cultures.” For example, Asian women deal with the stress of expressing anger. In Western culture, anger is an acceptable emotion to express, but angry is a negative emotion that is inhibited in Asian cultures.