Emotion Differences Between Uyghur And Han:Effects Of Culture, Gender And Attention

Emotions, which contain two independent dimensions (positive and negative emotions), play a very important role in human evolution and our daily life. As its processing is influenced by both biology and society, emotions become both universal and culturally specific. The cultural specificity is mainly reflected in the different emotional experience in the different culture. Numerous studies have found that people experience emotions in a bipolar way under the individualistic culture but in a moderate way under collectivism culture. Specifically, there are more both positive and negative emotions for individuals under the individualistic culture than under the collectivist culture, and positive and negative emotions are significantly negatively correlated at the same time.In addition, gender also has an important influence on emotions. Significantly differences are appeared between male and female on the emotional identification, emotional memory, emotional susceptibility and emotional expression. In general, female are more sensitive to negative emotional information than male. Currently, many cross-cultural studies only focused on the differences between the East and the West. However, few studies devoted to the emotional differences among sub-cultures in one nation. China, as a multi-ethnic nation, has its own spoken and written languages, customs and religious faith in its each ethnic group. Different sub-cultural characters from diverse ethnic groups may lead to different emotion experience. But little empirical research was found to investigate the emotional differences among ethnic groups in China. In the background of Chinese culture, what specific effects would sub-cultural differences among different ethnic groups exert to emotions? What is the cognitive mechanism of cross-culture? In order to solve this kind of questions, the present study explored the effects of culture, gender and cognition on emotions though a questionnaire survey and two behavioral experiments. The first study investigated the emotional differences between Uyghur and Han adults by using Positive Affect and Negative Affect Scale (PAN AS). The results showed that Uyghur adults had more both positive and negative emotions than Han adults. In addition, there were more positive emotions in male than in female, but no significant difference on negative emotions between male and female.The emotional experience includes identification, memory, evaluation and adjustment processes, which may be involved in sensation, perception, attention and memory. The second study compared the differences on emotional identification in different ethnic groups and different genders. The results indicated that the reaction time of negative emotions was significantly longer than that of positive emotions in all the participants, suggesting the appearance of attention maintenance phenomenon and deeper and elaborate cognitive processing of negative emotions. This might be due to biological importance of negative emotions. What’s more, the reaction time of emotions of Uyghur adults was more slowly than that of Han adults, which may be due to that Uyghur adults showed similar deeper cognitive processing for emotions.The third study used learning-recognition paradigm to explore the differences on emotional memory in different ethnic groups and genders. The results revealed that recognition reaction time of negative emotions were significantly longer than that of positive emotions. The adults of Uyghur’recognition reaction time was longer than adults of Han. These results were similar with the results of emotional identification. Moreover, the interaction of gender and emotion was significant on reaction time. Females’reaction time on negative emotions was longer than that of males. This might be the results of that females have higher degree of cognitive involvement towards negative emotions.To sum up, emotional negativity bias were exist and people process negative emotions more deeply and complexly. The "emotional bias" effect were appeared in Uyghur adults. They reacted lingeringly on emotional identification and recognition, which suggested that more cognitive resources and deeper and elaborate processing were put into the recognition of emotional information. In addition, the processing bias on negative emotions of female may bring out less cognitive processing on positive emotions. This might be one reason why females have less positive emotions.