10/21/19 Week 6 Response to "Emotional Expressivity"

In this week's blog post, I want to continue the amazing teachings of Professor Jon Ivers at BYU-Idaho. You might have read in my recent blog posts how I have been writing all about his discussions in the classroom. It is so awesome to learn from him! 

For today's topic, I learned about emotional expressivity relating to different countries and their cultures. As humans, we use our emotions to express ourselves. According to the words and actions of another person, we can understand how they might be feeling. It may show in their faces and movements as well. Different emotions help us feel different as well. If we didn't feel sad sometimes than we wouldn't understand how happiness felt. It is a great blessing that we have emotions. It allows us to really understand the different feelings of our daily lives! 

Throughout the lesson that Professor Ivers gave, he said some very interesting points. In the first few minutes, he said, 

"Emotional expressivity is one of the things that is more easily misunderstood than many other things in cross-cultural differences. It's very, very easy to interpret different ranges—to misinterpret different ranges of emotional expressivity."

I thought it was very interesting how it can be misinterpreted sometimes. But, the more I thought about this point he stated, the more I came to the conclusion that it was right. The reason why is because of the differences there are in other cultures. Take Uruguay for example. I served my mission there and it was different in an emotional sense because they expressed their emotions stronger than I was used to. At least two times a day, my companion and I would knock on someone's door. The person that would open it would usually decline us right away not even thinking about giving us a chance, as they slammed it right in our face. Towards the beginning of my mission, it was hard to think that someone would actually do that to another human being. It was just the fact that their emotions are used differently than I was used to. 

The last thing I wanted to quote Jon Ivers on is this, 

" If you're ever in a foreign country, notice what everyone else is doing before you show public affection for your spouse or boyfriend or girlfriend or whatever. Make sure you see if that public affection is being shown by others..." 

I completely agree with this statement because if we aren't aware of how others show different emotions, such as their affection, we might either offend, confuse, or even break some sort of law that we are unaware of. I think that is an important concept to take into consideration next time you visit a different country.

So there you go, everyone! I hope you enjoyed my post. Til next time. ☺