Smiles of a Sumatra Night

Presents evidence delineating just how much nature shapes our emotional reactions. Studies on Americans' expressions of anger; Studies on the Minangkabau, a matrilineal, Moslem agrarian culture; Physiological changes; Physiological responses to emotions; Common ties of humanity.

In the longest-running debate on human behavior, nature and nurture have been duking it out for over a century, with nature getting an awful lot of decisions in the past decade or two. Now comes evidence delineating just how much nature shapes our emotional reactions.

When Americans create the expressions associated with anger and fear, the autonomic nervous system swings into gear and puts the body on alert, raising heart rate and altering skin temperature. To determine whether these changes are specific to Americans, and thus learned, or are part of a common inheritance, Robert Levenson, Ph.D., of Berkeley, and Paul Ekman, Ph.D., of San Francisco, headed off to West Sumatra. There they looked at people as different from us as you can get: the Minangkabau, a matrilineal, Moslem, agrarian culture that discourages displays of negative emotion.

Yet, when the Minangkabau were taught facial muscle contraction in order to mimic angry or fearful expressions, they registered the same physiologic changes - though they didn't feel the same way. No matter how different we seem, deep down we're all alike, observes the team in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (Vol. 62, No. 6).

But if biological events turn out to be the same, subjective emotional experience is altogether different. "In our culture, we focus on the physiological sensations that happen when we feel emotions. This is in fact one of the most important aspects of emotion for us," reports Levenson. Ask an American what anger is and he'll tell you what he physically experiences when he is angry. But the Minangkabau didn't feel any emotions when they made the negative facial expressions.

"In their culture, the people are more entwined. Emotions define their relationships, not bodily sensations," explains Levenson. To them, anger is when a friend is mad at you, not how your body responds.

"Physiological responses to emotions are hard-wired into us; they're common for all people," says Levenson. "But what we do with that information is culturally variable."

published on January 01, 199

Love,

Abby

Sexy 7-Year Olds? by George Drinka, M.D.

With the media joining our families ever more intimately, it has become a common source of children’s sexual education. But how early should this education begin? Age 12? 11? 10? And how explicitly? In a recent article, we learn about a mother’s dilemma over a music video on YouTube whose lyrics go: “I got passion in my pants, and I ain’t afraid to show it, show it; I’m sexy and I know it.” The mom’s younger sister shows it to her children: a girl aged 7, and a boy, 10. The sister thinks this video is funny, not educational at all, and the kids laugh along—it’s only their mother who thinks it’s not funny.

The mother watches the video as a singer in the rock group shimmies around in a gold lace G-string, belting out the dicey lyrics. Fuming and flummoxed, she explores the Internet to discover that the world around her is crazy over this song: hundreds of YouTube videos feature kids under 10 dancing to these lyrics, while their parents record their gyrations and giggle behind their cameras.

Still, she is concerned this isn’t funny and way too suggestive. How to respond? First, she considers banning the song from her home but quickly anticipates that her kids will get upset with her, and they will only end up quarreling. Besides, they’ll find the video all the more enticing and go look for it elsewhere. Her next thought is to speak openly with her kids about its sexual content. But this tactic elicits blank stares, and, feeling embarrassed, she hesitates. At last, she gives up, deciding to ignore the incident and move on, but she’s still perplexed by the issue. What’s the right thing to do?

Perplexed myself, I too researched YouTube. On one site, I discovered the band performing on stage in underpants, with silly tongues protruding from comic mouths on their crotches. In another, a paunchy young man cavorts in underwear, sporting what seems a hard-on. In others, kids dance to the tune as their amused parents record it all. In one a baby in diapers rocks and rolls—I wondered, do diapers give a different meaning to “passion in my pants”? In still others, teen girls pantomime the hit in their bedrooms. In a pathetic rendition, very obese adults wriggle their flab and make light of the “sexy and I know it” lyric, as well as the later-appearing line, “I work out.”

In another twist, well-known animated figures dance and mouth the lyrics: Alvin and the Chipmunks, Homer Simpson, Peter from Family Guy, Sonic the Hedgehog, a few Sesame Street characters, and others. Now I could see more clearly why the mother was so confused: to the whole world, the song is a joke.

Slowly I perceived that humor was the central point. To the two kids, the image seemed goofy, silly, the stuff of comedy. When Peter in Family Guy does his thing to the lyrics, and Homer Simpson, drinking beer in underpants, lunges his torso, while SpongeBob Squarepants joins in with a few of his pals, and all the other comic figures thrust their pelvises to the beat, they elicit giggles and mirth. But is sex that humorous?

Laughter disarms us, but it also desensitizes us to the words: here sexual exhibitionism becomes a laugh. The daughter is only 7, and she’s learning about sex—only now, it’s funny. Since the mom doesn’t want to be a prude, she drops it, but her kids are imbedding sexually explicit words and gestures in their memory banks, even if they’re not sure what they’re saying or enacting.

George Drinka, M.D. is on the clinical faculty of the Oregon Health Sciences University.


Love,
Abby