Feeling in Japan: Culture, Emotion, and Brain

Catalog description

How does culture shape our feelings? This course will examine emotions from a cross cultural perspective and has three course objectives: (1) to increase students' awareness of how cultural ideas and practices shape their emotions by comparing their experiences in Kyoto with those in the U.S., (2) to teach students to apply a scientific understanding of culture and emotion to their experiences in Kyoto, and (3) to teach students how to formulate and test hypotheses about emotions in Japan vs. U.S. The proposed course will be comprised of three sections. The first section will focus on dominant theories of culture and emotions and the ways in which they are scientifically measured using a variety of self-report, behavioral, and physiological/neural measures. The second section will cover three patterns that emerge from the scientific literature regarding U.S.-East Asian differences in the focus of emotion, views of emotional expression, and values regarding emotional experience. Because much of the literature on culture and emotion focuses on U.S. and Japanese comparisons, the empirical findings will be directly applicable to the students studying at Kyoto. The third section will focus on the role of culture and emotion in applied settings (work, educational, and clinical) in the US and Japan. Students' structured and unstructured experiences and observations living in Kyoto will be the basis of our class discussions and will be linked to course material. For instance, students may be asked to analyze the themes and narratives of popular Japanese anime, art, and architecture based on methods introduced in class. As a comparison, students will identify products and practices in the U.S. that illustrate similarities and differences between the two cultures. Students will write short papers each week linking their experiences to the assigned material. At the end of the…