Emotions in norm transmission

In the transmission of cultural norms regarding emotion behavior, emotions are set in a reinforcement scene in socialization. Caregivers may react to the emotion expressions of infants and children with reward, punishment, overriding, neglect, or magnification (O'Neal & Magai Reference O'Neal and Magai2005). Positive parental response to emotion provides models for adaptive emotion regulation strategies (Gottman et al. Reference Gottman, Katz and Hooven1997), helping children to refine and rehearse emotion management skills. However, undesired emotion expression may be met with rejection, or criticism, from parents who do not foster the ability to identify and communicate emotions, or who may encourage the suppression of emotion, or the use of avoidant or aggressive emotion regulation strategies (Eisenberg et al. Reference Eisenberg, Fabes and Murphy1996; Gergely & Watson Reference Gergely, Watson and Rochat1999; Kench & Irwin Reference Kench and Irwin2000). As a consequence, undesired positive or negative emotions may not be differentiated properly, remaining undifferentiated, or become associated with another emotion. Primary emotion-related self–other representations resulting from this process (Gergely & Unoka Reference Gergely, Unoka, Sharp, Fonagy and Goodyer2008) are embedded in wider contextual narrative structures. These in turn create autobiographical self-representations (Berán & Unoka 2005), correlated with the activation of distributed networks in the brain (Conway Reference Conway2005).

Narratives and emotions

Several studies, such as the one by Oppenheim et al. (Reference Oppenheim, Nir, Warren and Emde1997), have shown that narrative organization, as revealed in the joint story-telling of 4–5-years-old children and their parents, correlates with emotional integrity. However, the formation of contextual narrative structures of emotions may result in pathological outcomes when affected by strict cultural norms regarding emotion display (e.g., Allan & Gilbert Reference Allan and Gilbert2002; Chaplin et al. Reference Chaplin, Cole and Zahn-Waxler2005; Le et al. Reference Le, Berenbaum and Raghavan2002), specific caregiver–child temperament constellations (e.g., Coplan et al. Reference Coplan, Reichel and Rowan2009), and caregiver pathologies of emotion regulation (e.g., Gergely & Unoka Reference Gergely, Unoka, Sharp, Fonagy and Goodyer2008; Silk et al. Reference Silk, Shaw, Prout, O'Rourke, Lane and Kovacs2011). In the latter case, the caregiver, due to his/her own mental disorder (e.g., depression, psychosis, personality disorders) is unable to help the child learn to regulate his/her own emotional responses.

Culture plays a central role in shaping how emotions are experienced and expressed. Certain cultures or subcultures restrict the open experience and expression of emotions, which may result in the pathology of alexithymia: a difficulty in identifying one's feelings and distinguishing them from bodily sensations, as well as a difficulty in communicating one's emotions to others (Le et al. Reference Le, Berenbaum and Raghavan2002). Alexithymia was found to be associated with difficulties in detection of the facial expression of anger, sadness, and fear (Prkachin et al. Reference Prkachin, Casey and Prkachin2009). Alexithymia was also negatively correlated with activation to sad and happy faces in several brain regions (Reker et al. Reference Reker, Ohrmann, Rauch, Kugel, Bauer, Dannlowski, Arolt, Heindel and Suslow2010), which are described by Lindquist et al. as the brain regions forming part of the distributed network realizing core affect. Hence, as a consequence of this type of socialization, negative emotions may remain undifferentiated, and this is correlated with a less-differentiated brain activation pattern, which would show up in fMRI studies.

Anger expression determined by social ranking is another point in the differentiation of emotions in social contexts. Occurrence of complex negative affect patterns is evident in sensitivity to social put-downs (Gilbert & Miles Reference Gilbert and Miles2000): feeling anxious or distressed about being put down is highly correlated with feeling angry/irritated. Allan and Gilbert (Reference Allan and Gilbert2002) found that self-perceptions of inferior rank and feeling trapped affects anger suppression. The rank of the target also affects anger expression: People who respond angrily to social put-downs tend to suppress their anger more when they are frustrated by a higher-rank target, compared to a lower-rank one. This result is in accord with animal studies of aggression which show marked variations in aggression expressed up and down the ranks (Archer Reference Archer1988).

In response to the stimulus of an angry facial expression in an fMRI study, the brain reactions of persons within a rigid rank-relational schema will be different for a person of lower-rank compared to one of higher-rank. People with a submissive self-schema in their narrative self-representation would react with fear, whereas those with a dominant self-schema would react with anger. Thus, in addition to emotion activation, a facial-expression stimulus activates a social relational self–other schema – an interactional pattern, which activates different neural networks of the brain. The representation of rank order and the appropriate reaction to the facial expression of the angry other is embedded in narrative self-representations, which are further complicated by cultural norms concerning appropriate emotion expression.

Parental reactions to child emotions also play an important socializing role in the development of children's emotional self-regulation (Eisenberg et al. Reference Eisenberg, Fabes and Murphy1996). Mothers with a history of childhood depression are less likely than mothers without such history to respond in supportive ways to children's negative emotions, and are more likely to magnify, punish, or neglect negative emotions (Silk et al. Reference Silk, Shaw, Prout, O'Rourke, Lane and Kovacs2011). These parental responses one year later were associated with children's internalizing symptoms, which suggest that in the development of internalizing pathologies, atypical socialization of emotion may play a role. Thus, if the caregiver rejects the child's display of a negative emotion, such as anger, then it may become associated with other emotions, such as fear, separation anxiety, or guilt, due to their contextual embeddedness in narrative structures. The anger schema of such individuals includes fear, and related self-to-other and other-to-self affective representations (Gergely & Unoka Reference Gergely, Unoka, Sharp, Fonagy and Goodyer2008).

Internalization disorders, avoidant attachment style, and adult avoidant and dependent personality disorders are examples of such an association of emotions. These emotion scripts raise the methodological problem that the emotion activated in the experimental setting will consist of the quick activation of two emotions – anger and fear, for instance, since they share a common neural network. Consequently, because of the low temporal resolution of fMRI, the neural correlates of the two emotions can hardly be differentiated.

All of these factors suggest that the psychological constructivism suggested by Lindquist et al. can be given a more detailed socio-cultural interpretation in this respect. The relativistic and contextual interpretation provided for the brain basis for emotions could converge with developmental and clinical contextual interpretations.