Emotional Responsiveness: A Temporal Study

Introduction There are few things that are universally shared between all members of the human species – one of the most prominent being our emotions and feelings. Studies have focused on this broad topic of emotion from an evolutionary perspective – suggesting that certain primal instincts such as fear or disgust are innate. Our bodily response to them functions as a way to increase or decrease our responsiveness to the stimuli. For example, fear is associated with widened eyes and flared nostrils – both attributes that help one take in the environment and stimuli more, in order to cause heightened awareness to whatever is eliciting the fear (Ekman et. al, 1999). However, some emotions that we process can be categorized as learned, secondary ones. These …show more content…
We can determine if certain cultural mindsets and upbringings influence the way people perceive and express emotions. Because emotion is such a key factor in how we interact and respond to the world, by following the evolution of emotional expressivity in different cultures we can gain understanding about how these groups in particular interact with and respond to the world at different points in their lives. This kind of temporal study will also allow us to define a ‘critical period’ where we observe the greatest increase in growth rate. The critical period could be a timeframe where our brains are the most sensitive to emotional recognition, providing another topic of interest for psychologists in this field. Possible future ways to take this project would be looking at factors other than culture. We can also look at this through a lens of how socioeconomic status can affect emotional expressivity, or how the number of siblings in a family affects emotional expressivity. The culmination of all these findings would provide a larger perspective on how we acquire secondary or learned emotions throughout our