Researchers at the MPI for Psycholinguistics and the MPI for Evolutionary Anthropology have set out to answer the question, does our understanding of emotions depend on the language we speak, or is our perception the same regardless of language and culture?

ScienceDaily reports on Understanding Emotions without Language. This new study, which suggests that emotions evolved as a set of basic human mechanisms, compared speakers of German to speakers of Yucatec  Maya, which has only one word for the emotions of disgust and anger.

“Earlier research has found that people who have different words for two emotions do better on this task when the dominant emotion in the two photographs is different, like when one is mainly angry and the other one is mainly disgusted,” explains Disa Sauter. “But is this because they internally label the faces angry and disgusted, or is it because emotions are processed by basic human mechanisms that have categories like anger and disgust regardless of whether we have words for those feelings?”

The studies results were published in Emotion a journal of the APA.  “Our results show that understanding emotional signals is not based on the words you have in your language to describe emotions,” Sauter says. “Instead, our findings support the view that emotions have evolved as a set of basic human mechanisms…”

There are many reasons in our fast paced world to be socially connected to a plethora of people.   But is is really as beneficial as we think?  Past research has shown that feeling socially connected is both physically and emotionally good for you.

Time Healthland states that new research explores the issue of how people who had a strong sense of social support would behave toward those outside their circle.

The researchers, from Northwestern University, set out to determine whether feelings of connectedness led to tendencies to “dehumanize” others.  “By ‘dehumanization,’ we mean the failure to consider another person as having a mind,” says lead author Adam Waytz.

The researchers conducted a few experiments.  One experiment found that the participants who had written about feeling supported were more likely to dehumanize addicted and disabled people, lowering their rankings of various aspects of mind by about one point on a 7 point scale.

“Even though you are extremely socially connected, at some point, it comes at the expense of the ability to consider the full humanity of those around you,” reported Waytz.

Participants also tended to judge other people more harshly when with a friend than when with a stranger.  “We think there are two reasons,” says Waytz. “One is that experience of social connection draws a circle around you that defines who is in and who is out. It very clearly delineates who is ‘us versus them’ and when it is ‘us versus them,’ people outside appear to be less human.”

Waltz goes onto purport, “The more interesting reason is that social connection is sort of like eating. When you are hungry, you seek out food. When you are lonely, you seek social connection. When the experience of social connection is elevated, we feel socially ‘full’ and have less desire to seek out other people and see them in a way that treats them as essentially human.”

What are your thoughts on this research?  Do you have any examples where this has played out in your life?