Singapore is Least Emotional Nation; Mine Most

Are all Southeast Asians stereotypically taciturn? Well no. BusinessWeek has an interesting article entitled "Singapore Confronts an Emotion Deficit" that, in my opinion, provides some ammunition for Singaporeans-as-automatons stereotypes. Worker ants, to make an analogy. The data comes from an international poll from Gallup on how often respondents expressed emotion recently. The implication here of course is that Singapore has managed to get ahead by getting many of its citizens to carry on with a "stiff upper lip" in the British vernacular without raising much of a fuss. Oddly enough, Singapore is classed with many former Soviet Republics in this respect:

By contrast, the Singaporeans' fellow Southeast Asians the Filipinos--yours truly included--are supposedly the most emotional people in the world. We even manage to outdo those famously dramatic Latin Americans. Maybe that explains the melancholy subtitle of this blog--along with mood swings in blogging output depending on your perception:

All I can say is that Singaporeans were even more emotionless in previous iterations of this survey according to the Gallup writeup which found that only 30% showed emotion in 2011. Meanwhile, I guess the results lend more credence to Filipinos being more "Latinate" in character as opposed to "Confucian" owing to its Spanish colonial heritage. Then again, it is curious that nobody says the Indonesians are "Latinate" due to their history of Portugese colonization.

Meanwhile, all this talk makes me, well, emotional [sigh]. Excuse me while I take a breather from blogging for today...