Research Design Connection: Preferred Emotional States
Jeanne Tsai conducts culture-based research on emotions, and her findings are useful to anyone attempting to develop places or objects that support desired emotional experiences, such as leisure areas at workplaces. Dawson, reporting on the 2017 International Conception of Psychological Science in Vienna states that: “Tsai and her collaborators have found that…Cross-culturally people characterize emotions as positive or negative (called ‘valence’) and stimulating or soothing (called ‘arousal’). ‘Ecstatic’ and ‘relaxed’ are both positive-valence emotions, for example, but ‘ecstatic’ is high arousal, while ‘relaxed’ is low arousal. When asked about how they would ideally like to feel, European Americans typically preferred excitement and elation more than did Chinese, who preferred calm and relaxation more than did European Americans. There were no differences in how much European Americans and Chinese reported actually feeling those emotions, however. ‘Cultural factors may shape how we want to feel more than how we actually feel,’ …
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