ИСТИНА

Abstract: Contemporary models of emotional regulation highlight the key role of the subjective assessment of emotive influences in the emergence and determination of the nature of emotions. This assessment is based on cognitive processes such as attention and interpretation, which, in particular, depend on the shaping influences of the social environment. Social influences, in turn, directly depend on the culture of a person’s home country. This study compared the assessments of emotionally charged images by respondents from Russia (n=68) and Azerbaijan (n=76). The images were color photographs representing emotional scenes. In a preliminary study, the images were categorized by emotional categories in the following way: 6 stimuli evoking positive emotions and 6 stimuli evoking negative emotions. Two categories of emotionally positive stimuli were created, one of which included images that evoked mainly joy, and the other - mainly surprise. Among the emotionally negative stimuli, two categories were created, one of which included images that evoked mainly anger or fear, and the other - mainly disgust or sadness. The respondent used a special computer program to sequentially evaluate the selected images on the valence and activation scales. Valence denotes the positive or negative value; activation (arousal) denotes the excitement associated with the experienced emotion. Analysis of the obtained data demonstrated largely similar patterns of emotional assessments in the Russian and Azerbaijani samples. However, a number of differences were also established, which mostly concerned the assessments of emotional scenes with negative connotations. It can be stated that the assessments of negative emotional scenes by representatives of the Azerbaijani culture are more shifted towards the negative pole than in the Russian sample. At the same time, they assess these images as less activating and more controlled. Similar discrepancies were recorded when comparing samples of Indian and American students (Roseman, Dhawan et al., 1995). Indian students rated the emotions of anger and sadness as less exciting.