Coping With the Sunday Scaries
A few years ago, I was in the kitchen of a friend’s house preparing a meal. When we all sat down to eat, my friend’s wife wolfed down her supper and then disappeared into another room to do some work. He smiled and said, “Sunday nights are the new Monday mornings around here.”
I was surprised at the time. Now, I find myself
Apparently, my Sunday-night anxieties and Monday-morning blues are not unique to me alone. A new study led by Ilke Inceoglu from the University of Exeter found that this phenomenon often takes the form of mental concerns about the week ahead, as well as feelings of nervousness and difficulty with sleeping. “It’s as if your mind moves away from
Inceoglu found that these Sunday scaries were particularly pronounced
What should we do about the “Sunday scaries”? Researchers have offered some useful suggestions that
Dear Sally,
I recently became engaged, I love my fiancé a lot but we are getting into a lot of arguments
It’s not a question whether we can afford it although I
——Nervous
Dear Nervous,
Planning weddings
Why don’t the two of you talk about
——Sally
3 . In the film Inside Out, 11-year-old Riley’s emotions are personified as brightly colored internal figures that drive her behaviors. The same five emotions—anger, fear, disgust (憎恶), sadness, and joy—appear in every other character’s head as well, functioning in much the same way in each individual. In Western cultures, this is the case, argues psychologist Batja Mesquita in Between Us. Emotions in such contexts, she writes, are considered “MINE,” or “Mental, INside the person, and Essentialist,” the latter defined in the book as always having the same properties.
This conception of emotion is not universal, however. Emotions elsewhere, she argues, are thought of as “OURS”—“OUtside the person, Relational, and Situated.” Using this distinction, Mesquita sets about contrasting emotions in “the West,” where the individual is the top concern, with “the Rest,” where community is prioritized.
Mesquita describes amae as a central emotion in Japanese culture, where it builds interdependence by encouraging tolerance in parenting process. She describes hasham—which includes shame, embarrassment, and social respectability—as a fundamental emotion for Egyptian Bedouins (游牧人). Such observations provide a background for her to explore a range of issues, including childhood socialization, the nature of friendship, the role of language in shaping emotions, and cross-cultural communication in a globalized world.
Despite Mesquita’s emphasis on cross-cultural emotions, there is little discussion of whether the MINE-OURS dichotomy (二分法) accurately explains global cultural variation. Other scholars have noted, for example, that hunter-gatherer societies at the same time emphasize both individual self-government and social cooperation. And in an apparent contradiction to her earlier arguments, Mesquita herself ultimately concludes that Westerners have OURS emotions.
Taken as a whole, however, the book contributes much to the discussion of the origins of emotions, presenting a remarkable collection of cross-cultural studies intermixed with personal stories about foreign residents’ struggles to reunite diverse emotional and social worlds. In chapter 8, for example, Mesquita describes an incident where she—a Dutch native living in the United States—bumped into the famous American psychologist Hazel Markus at a conference Markus helped organize. Wishing to express understanding of Markus’s workload, Mesquita declared “You look a little tired.” The remark appeared to make Markus nervous and confused but was intended as an expression of sympathy—to sympathize in Dutch is to acknowledge suffering, not offer comfort as in the US.
The book’s take-home message is fundamental: There are no natural emotions, no inborn emotions, no universal emotions. Mesquita argues that emotions are “meaning making” and “a preparation for action” and that the idea of “emotions as inner states” is a Western construct. Instead, she suggests that emotions are a “dance” cocreated between people who live in a specific cultural context at a particular historical moment.
1. In Between Us, Mesquita indicates that ______.| A．the Japanese build kids’ emotion of shame in parenting |
| B．MINE-OURS dichotomy is the very cause of cross-cultural emotions |
| C．emotions outside “the West” are considered community-centred |
| D．hunter-gatherers have both emotions of “OURS” and “MINE” |
| A．the emotion of sympathy is to offer help in Dutch culture |
| B．foreign residents from different cultures usually unite as one |
| C．as Dutch Mesquita shows her personality of warmth and caring |
| D．cross-cultural emotional exchanges probably cause misunderstanding |
| A．Family education hardly influences one’s emotions. |
| B．Sociocultural contexts largely contribute to emotions. |
| C．Western people’s emotions have no properties of OURS. |
| D．Internal factors play a vital role in shaping how we feel. |
| A．The cultural landscape of emotions | B．The cultural origin of emotions |
| C．The cultural convention of emotions | D．The cultural shock of emotions |
4 . Noah reached for his guitar, remembering his father as he did so, thinking how much he missed him. He strummed once, adjusted the tension on two strings, then strummed again. This time it sounded about right, and he began to play.
Soft music, quiet music. He hummed for a little while at first, then began to sing as night came down around him. He played and sang until the sun was gone and the sky black. It was a little after seven when he quit, and he settled back into his chair and began to rock. By habit, he looked upward and saw Orion and the Big Dipper, Gemini and the Pole Star, twinkling in the autumn sky. He started to run the numbers in his head, then stopped. He knew he’d spent almost his entire savings on the house and would have to find a job again soon, but he pushed the thought away and decided to enjoy the remaining months of restoration without worrying about it. Besides, thinking about money usually bored him. Early on, he’d learned to enjoy simple things, things that couldn’t be bought, and he had a hard time understanding people who felt otherwise. It was another trait he got from his father.
Clem, his hound dog, came up to him then and nuzzled his hand before lying down at his feet. “Hey, girl, how’re you doing?” he asked as he patted her head, and she whined softly, her soft round eyes peering upward. A car accident had taken her leg, but she still moved well enough and kept him company on quiet nights like these. He was thirty-one now, not too old, but old enough to be lonely. He hadn’t dated since he’d been back here, hadn’t met anyone who remotely interested him. It was his own fault, he knew. There was something that kept a distance between him and any woman who started to get close, something he wasn’t sure he could change even if he tried. And sometimes in the moments right before sleep came, he wondered if he was destined to be alone forever.
The evening passed, staying warm, nice. Noah listened to the crickets and the rustling leaves, thinking that the sound of nature was more real and aroused more emotion than things like cars and planes. Natural things gave back more than they took, and their sounds always brought him back to the way man was supposed to be. “It’ll keep you from going crazy,” his father had told him the day he’d shipped out. “It’s God’s music and it’ll take you home.” He finished his tea, went inside, found a book, then turned on the porch light on his way back out. After sitting down again, he looked at the book. It was old, the cover was torn, and the pages were stained with mud and water.
It was Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman, and he had carried it with him throughout the war. It had even taken a bullet for him once. He rubbed the cover, dusting it off just a little. Then he let the book open randomly and read the words in front of him: This is thy hour O Soul, thy free flight into the wordless. Away from books, away from art, the day erased, the lesson done. Thee fully forth emerging, silent, gazing, pondering the themes thou lovest best. Night, sleep, death and the stars. For some reason Whitman always reminded him of New Bern, and he was glad he’d come back. Though he’d been away from fourteen years, this was home and he knew a lot of people here, most of them from his youth. Like so many southern towns, the people who lived here never changed, they just grew a bit older.
1. The underlined sentence in paragraph two is the equivalent of “_________”.| A．he hated those who were unable to appreciate simple things in life |
| B．he didn’t see eye to eye with people who liked to save money |
| C．he had difficulty in figuring out how he got this trait from his father |
| D．he didn’t understand why people were so materialistic |
| A．Noah often played the guitar and observed the stars. |
| B．Clem the dog showed great affection for her master. |
| C．Noah was destined to be alone since no woman seemed interested in him. |
| D．Noah planned to restore his house before landing himself a job. |
| A．Patients suffering from mental disorder can be cured by nature. |
| B．The closer you are to nature, the closer you are to your true self. |
| C．Where there is God’s music, there is home. |
| D．A good book is a man’s best company. |
| A．had been a treasure but was now too damaged to read |
| B．recorded the lives of New Bern’s people who never changed over the years |
| C．was beyond Noah’s understanding so he randomly picked up some words to read |
| D．stirred a feeling of nostalgia in Noah |
5 . Unlike so-called basic emotions such as sadness, fear and anger, guilt emerges a little later, in line with a child's growing grasp of social and moral standards. Children aren't born knowing how to say “I'm sorry”; rather, they learn over time that such statements appease parents and friends—and their own consciences. This is why researchers generally regard so-called moral guilt, in the right amount, to be a good thing.
In the popular imagination, of course, guilt still gets a bad reputation. It is deeply uncomfortable—it's the emotional equivalent of wearing a jacket stuffed with stones. Yet this understanding is outdated. “There has been a kind of revival or a rethinking about what role guilt can serve”, says Amrisha Vaish, a psychology researcher at the University of Virginia, adding that this revival is part of a larger recognition that emotions aren't binary-feelings that may be advantageous in one context may be harmful in another. Jealousy and anger, for example, may have evolved to alert us to important inequalities. Too much happiness can be destructive.
And guilt, by prompting us to think more deeply about our own goodness, can encourage humans to make up for errors and fix relationships. Guilt, in other words, can help hold a cooperative species together. It is a kind of social glue.
Viewed in this light, guilt is an opportunity. Work by Tina Malti, a psychology professor at the University of Toronto, suggests that guilt may compensate for an emotional deficiency. In a number of studies, Malti and others have shown that guilt and sympathy may represent different pathways to cooperation and sharing. Some kids who are low in sympathy may make up for that shortfall by experiencing more guilt, which can control their disgusting behaviors. And vice versa: high sympathy can substitute for low guilt.
In a 2014 study, for example, Malti looked at 244 children. Using caregiver assessments and the children's self-observations, she rated each child's overall sympathy level and his or her tendency to feel negative emotions after moral wrongdoings. Then the kids were handed chocolate coins, and given a chance to share them with an anonymous child. For the low-sympathy kids, how much they shared appeared to turn on how likely they were to feel guilty. The ones more likely to feel guilty tended to share more, even though they hadn't magically become more sympathetic to the other children.
“That's good news,” Malti says. “We can be prosocial because we caused harm and we feel regret.”
1. The underlined word “appease” in the first paragraph is closest in meaning to “_________”.| A．content | B．disappoint | C．amuse | D．distract |
| A．general impression of guilt being overestimated |
| B．incorrect idea about the nature and function of guilt |
| C．out-of date belief of guilt being their primary burden |
| D．long-held prejudice against those who often feel guilty |
| A．It's necessary to ensure kids feel guilty about their wrongdoings. |
| B．Regretful kids need to be given a chance to correct their behaviors. |
| C．Feeling guilty has the power to make kids become more sympathetic |
| D．The highest guilt could possibly be found in kids with the lowest sympathy. |
| A．Guilt vs Sympathy | B．Good News for Guilty People |
| C．Don't feel Guilty About Your Guilt | D．What Lies Underneath Your Guilt |
