I thought all of the readings for this week focused on a really interesting aspect of child development that is not often explored: the significant developments that allow for emotion. I thought that Lewis in particular had a lot of interesting things to say involving the emergence of consciousness, both of the self and of society. Lewis argues that this cognition is necessary to understand and produce complex emotions that we have discussed including guilt, love, jealousy, etc. The importance of cognitive evaluation (how he distinguished between emotional states and emotional experience) also seemed particularly relevant in cultural differences in emotion. He again discusses that case of the Japanese and comes to, I think, a very interesting and palpable conclusion: "It may be the case that Japanese children or adults may act in an angry way and may even have the emotional state of anger. However, since having such a state is inappropriate, they are not likely to have the emotional experience of anger" (p. 274). I think this theory probes deeper into the cultural realm than others have, and examines the abstract "display rules" in a developmentally and culturally significant way.
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"It may be the case that Japanese children or adults may act in an angry way and may even have the emotional state of anger. However, since having such a state is inappropriate, they are not likely to have the emotional experience of anger" (p. 274).
This excerpt is very interesting in terms of its ties to appropriateness and how much society dictates one's "emotional experience."
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