378 CHAPTER 9
SUBJECTIVE EXPERIENCE: LABELING EMOTION The third element of emotion is
interpreting the subjective feeling by giving it a label: anger, fear, disgust, happiness,
sadness, shame, interest, and so on. Another way of labeling this element is to call it the
“cognitive element,” because the labeling process is a matter of retrieving memories
of previous similar experiences, perceiving the context of the emotion, and coming up
with a solution—a label.
The label a person applies to a subjective feeling is at least in part a learned response
influenced by their language and culture. Such labels may differ in people of different
cultural backgrounds. For example, researchers in one study (J. L. Tsai et al., 2004) found
that Chinese Americans who were still firmly rooted in their original Chinese culture
were far more likely to use labels to describe their emotions that referred to bodily sen-
sations (such as “dizzy”) or social relationships (such as “friendship”) than were more
“Americanized” Chinese Americans and European Americans, who tended to use more
directly emotional words (such as “liking” or “love”).
In another study, even the subjective feeling of happiness showed cultural dif-
ferences (Kitayama & Markus, 1994). In this study, Japanese students and students
from the United States were found to associate a general positive emotional state with
entirely different circumstances. In the case of the Japanese students, the positive state
was more associated with friendly or socially engaged feelings. The students from the
United States associated their positive emotional state more with feelings that were
socially disengaged, such as pride. This finding is a further reflection of the differ-
ences between collectivistic and individualistic cultures. A major goal for psycholo-
gists engaged in cross-cultural research in emotions is to attempt to understand the
meaning of other people’s mental and emotional states without interpreting them
incorrectly, or misleadingly, in the language or mindset of the researchers (Shweder
et al., 2008).
Early Theories of Emotion
9.9 Distinguish among the common-sense, James-Lange, Cannon-Bard, and
facial feedback theories of emotion.
So which of the three elements is the most important?
In the early days of psychology, it was assumed that feeling a particular emotion led first
to a physical reaction and then to a behavioral one. According to this viewpoint—we’ll
call it the common-sense theory of emotion—seeing a snarling dog in one’s path causes the
feeling of fear, which stimulates the body to arousal, followed by the behavioral act of
running; that is, people are aroused because they are afraid. (See Figure 9.8.)
Figure 9.8 Common-Sense Theory of Emotion
In the common-sense theory of emotion, a stimulus (snarling dog) leads to an emotion of fear, which then
leads to bodily arousal (in this case, indicated by shaking) through the autonomic nervous system (ANS).
FEAR
ANS arousal
Stimulus First response Second response
Common sense
theory
“I’m shaking
because I’m afraid.”
Snarling dog Conscious fear
