Conflict scenario emotion events in reality television: a cross-cultural perspective

Abstract

The present paper provides an analysis of an Indian female contestant and a British female contestant involved in an Emotion Event, conflict scenario in Celebrity Big Brother, a British reality television show that was aired by the Channel 4 television company. It was shown that the spoken communication between the two contestants conformed to the low context vs. high context communication cultures that are associated with collectivism and individualism, respectively. More specifically, whereas the more collectivistic Indian participant engaged in a more inferred, contextualised and implicit communication style, the style of communication of the British participant was characterised by a clear, logical, explicit message. Furthermore, in a typical individualistic response to the hurtful threat of shame, the British participant, in contrast to the Indian participant who demonstrated a more socially constructive response, employed a more aggressive, confrontational response strategy that was characterised by fight (Wilson, 2017) and relatively uncontrolled anger. This opposes the viewpoint that emotions are discrete entities that function independently of other emotions and supports a conceptual structure of emotions that is based on the proximity of emotion clusters (Wilson & Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk, 2019).