Emotions In Motion Chapter 1 Summary

Chapter 10 called, “Emotions in Motion” comes from the textbook The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Psychology. This chapter goes into detail about how emotions guide much of what we do, how they focus our attention, help us record experiences in our memory, and arouse us. Emotions are feelings that drive us to behave in certain ways, they’re inherited, specialized mental states designed to deal with recurring situations in the world. This chapter gets into how emotions are more complicated than feelings. Feelings are felt differently for each person depending on how personally significant the situation is. Our culture influences how we express emotion as well. The chapter compares Finnish people with American people to explain how Americans show feelings …show more content…
It has been proven that all humans speak and understand the same emotional language, no matter where you are in the world. Although, culture sets the standard for when to show certain emotions and for the social appropriateness of various emotional displays. These standards vary from one place to the next. The example from the book involves Americans and Finns. Finnish culture seems to involve one facial expression for many different emotions. Happiness, sadness, confusion are all the same face. Whereas, American culture seems to involve a variety of facial expressions for emotions. Finnish people likely believe Americans are immature children. Guilt also changes from culture and from person to person. Some psychologists believe guilt is designed to keep us from repeating bad behaviors in the future. This is called withdrawal motivation. The opposite of this, or approach motivation, means others see guilt as a form of social control that motivates us to keep our behavior in line with the moral standards of our community. There are a variety of things that influence how we express feelings, and culture takes a large part those