The Emotions as a Culture-Common Framework of Motivational Experiences and Communicative Cues.

Several important conclusions follow from the assumptions that the fundamental emotions are (a) innate, universal phenomena, and (b) the components of man's principal motivation system. All people have in the fundamental emotions the capacity for a common set of subjective experiences and expressions. These have a special communication value. The communication function facilitates the interpersonal and inter-cultural understanding of the underlying subjective experience. They may serve as a base for interpersonal and cross-cultural understanding. The emotions tend to generate a set of cognitive labels that translate to a corresponding common set of meanings. These theses seem to be corroborated by Thurstone's concept of the role of affect in race attitude scaling and by Osgood's finding that the affective dimension of meaning shows the greatest cross-cultural constancy. These conclusions support an expanded definition of phenomenal field. It was proposed that the subjective culture is determined by innate and socio-cultural factors and by unique person-environment interactions. Since the emotions were considered to be man's principal motivation system and to be motivating experiences, they were viewed as the most fundamental and culture -common aspects of subjective culture and phenomenal field. (AUTHOR)