When going over the section in the book entitled Emotion and Motivation, I was struck by the universality of emotion over different cultures. I was amazed by the study done by Paul Ekman in which cultures who had never been exposed to Western Culture before could still recognize emotions in westerners faces fairly accurately.
http://sharpbrains.files.wordpress.com/2006/09/faces.jpg
This shows that emotions are fairly universal over cultures and also that emotions have an evolutionary base. I found it fascinating that all emotions can be broken down into seven basic emotions: happiness, sadness, surprise, anger, disgust, fear and contempt. I also found the two factor theory of emotion very interesting. Before taking psychology, I had never really thought about how emotions were created, I just took them as an inevitability, and now that I had learned about emotion, I could better understand my emotions. Psychology has taught me this lesson in many factors of my life. I had always taken many aspects of psychology as inevitabilities. Now that I am aware of psychological phenomena, I am more aware of my surroundings and can more effectively react to and think about the world.
I also find it very interesting that emotions are fairly universal across cultures. I think it's nice to know that we are connected to people of other cultures in some way, that we have a basis to relate upon. Emotions seem to be a connecting factor in all people, no matter how different their lives are from each other.