Cultural Blog on emotion

I did not get the chance to visit Weimar as of yet but it is on my to-do-list! I will reflect on my experience in Berlin when we visited the Holocaust memorial in Berlin. I felt many emotions after the tour when we got to see some of the families of the victims that were at camps during the holocaust. Some of the emotions mentioned in chapter 5 included the appraisal theory (the incongruent emotions), anger, sadness and disgust. I felt these things because I couldn't wrap my head around how someone could do this to a huge group of people. The ways they executed the victims of the holocaust were very cruel and inhumane. Sally Planalp mentioned that emotions go through a process and the first thing that gained my attention were the pictures of the family members that were killed. Once I started focusing on the event on what happened I really had a better representation of what happened. For example I read the scripts that mentioned what happened to the families. They were rounded up and sent to a certain camp like Auschwitz, worked till they died of starvation or were gassed to death when they could not work any longer. Once I read this and had a better representation of how terrible it was, I started to feel very sad for them. I felt some of my emotions are socially constructed but if I were to put my self in their shoes and if this was my family then how could someone do this to us. I started to become more emotional when I put my self in their shoes even though I wasn't part of the holocaust or anything. An interesting thing I found in chapter 5 was that people from collectivist cultures see themselves from the other's point of view. (Cohen and Gunz (2002). When I did this the experience felt more real to take it to a more personal level. In the book it mentioned Anger for Americans as a "useful" emotion. Becoming angry isn't always bad and it can be channeled to do productive things. (Kovecses, 2000) I think going to this museum does make me angry and would make me to do something proactive if something like happened again. I defiantly bottled up some of my emotions during the trip because I didn't want to show others how bad I felt for those victims. At times to cope with my own emotions I used the museum as a learning tool and hope others used it as a learning tool as well so we never have a repeat of the holocaust.

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