Studies On Identification Of Self-conscious Emotions For Students From Minorities

Emotion, the individual experience and attitude to objective things, is composed of physiological activation, explicit expression and inner experiences. Emotion understanding is the knowledge for individual to know consciously about how emotion working or being processed, which helps individual adapting social environment well. How to express and identify emotions are two critical capabilities in emotion understanding. Emotions can be divided into basic emotions and self-conscious emotions. Specifically, self-conscious emotions are the emotional state that appeared after the development of self-conscious, which are more complexity and advanced than basic emotions. Pride and shame are two typical self-conscious emotions, both of which are developed after basic emotions. Their emotional valence are opposite to each other: the pride is positive emotion while the shame is negative emotion.Studies have shown that there was no difference among people from different culture backgrounds when identifying emotions of shame and proud. However, these cross-culture studies on self-conscious emotions concerned different countries or races, little is known about whether the recognition or development of self-conscious emotions is consistent or not among different minorities within the same country.The present study was to examine the recognition and development characteristics of self-conscious emotions for typical minorities of Yunnan in China. Participants were selected from Bai, Dai, Yi, and Hani minorities in Yunnan, since the four minorities were distinctive and have large population. Five studies including fourteen experiments were carried out. In Study1, nonverbal behavior expression of self-conscious emotions of undergraduates from Han, Bai, Dai, Yi, and Hani nationalities were encoded. There were2experiments. In Experiment1, nonverbal behavior expressions of pride and shame of the five nationalities were extracted by structured interview. And nonverbal behavior expressions of pride and shame of the5nationalities were encoded, which making up a ethnic emotional photo gallery of pride and shame. In Experiment2, precise eye tracking were employed to record eye movements of the5nationalities whether they used nonverbal behavior expression cues when identifying emotions of pride or shame. And the results showed that there was a good reliability of self-conscious emotions cues extracted in Experiment1.In Study2, two experiments were included, which were to investigate whether there were difference when children in grade1,3or5from Bai, Dai, Yi, or Hani minorities recognized self-conscious emotions of pride and shame of the native and the alien. Experiment3examined the development characteristics on the perception of pride while Experiment4was the shame by recording the reaction time and accuracy when the three grades children from four minorities identifying self-conscious emotions of the native and the alien.In Study3, four experiments were included with the purpose to examined whether national costumes cues facilitated undergraduates from Bai, Dai,Yi, or Hani identifying the pride or not. To be specific, we explored whether there was difference or consistency when participants from Bai in Experiment5, from Dai in Experiment6, from Yi in Experiment7, and from Hani in Experiment8, identified the pride of ethnic minorities (Bai, Dai,Yi, or Hani) wearing white T-shirt or the national costumes, respectively.In Study4, four experiments were included with the purpose to explore whether national costumes cues facilitated undergraduates from Bai, Dai, Yi, and Hani when identifying the shame or not. Specifically, we explored whether there was difference or consistency when participants from Bai in Experiment9, from Dai in Experiment10, from Yi in Experiment11, and from Hani in Experiment12, identified the shame of ethnic minorities (Bai, Dai,Yi, or Hani) wearing white T-shirt or the national costumes, respectively.Study5was designed to explore how different level (high or low) social status affected undergraduate participants from Han, Bai, Dai, Yi, and Hani identifying self-conscious emotions (pride or shame). Specifically, two experiments were included:Experiment13was aimed to investigate how social status affected the identification of pride while Experiment14was aimed to examined how social status affected the identification of shame.The conclusion was made as follows based on the findings of the five studies:(1) Nonverbal behaviour expressing units of shame and pride contained eyes, fixation direction, month, chin, head, trunk and hands. It indicated that body posture and facial expression were important cues, with a more important role for facial expression. But the cues using for emotions identification were not the same among different minorities.(2) There were salient grade difference when children in primary school from Bai, Dai, Yi, and Hani identifying emotions of shame and pride, and the tendency was the consistent among the four minorities:the ability level of identifying the shame or pride was lower as children in a lower grade, with the lowest for children in grade1. The ability of identification of shame developed at a slow rate, while the pride developed rapid at grade3(the key stage). However, there was other-race effect when children recognizing the shame or pride, that is, children in primary school from Bai, Dai, Yi, and Hani had a higher accuracy when identifying their native self-conscious emotions than other nations.(3) There was no other-race effect for Bai undergraduates while there was the effect for Dai, Yi, and Hani when they identifying the pride. Moreover, providing national costumes cues promoted Bai but interfered Dai, Yi, and Hani when identifying the pride.(4) There was other-race effect for Bai undergraduates while there was not for Dai, Yi, and Hani when they identifying the shame. Moreover, providing national costumes cues interfered Bai but promoted Dai, Yi, and Hani when identifying the shame.(5) Social status had impact on the identification of self-conscious emotions: comparing to people in lower social status, Bai, Dai Yi, and Hani undergraduates were more precise on recognizing the pride of people in higher social status; but Bai and Yi undergraduates were more slowly on identifying the shame of people in higher social status, while it was not for Dai and Hani.