River: Lexithymia

[mdlbear]

Thanks to this post by @elf, we have a fascinating article: What if emotions aren’t universal but specific to each culture? | Aeon Essays. Apparently recent research contradicts the widely-held theory -- the article calls it the Basic Emotion Theory -- that a small number of "basic emotions" are "hard-wired" by evolution, and that a person who is unable to recognize them in themself or other people is afflicted with a disorder called "Alexithymia", which translates roughly as "not having words for emotions". According to the Aeon article (from which all quotes in this post are taken unless otherwise noted),

The Basic Emotion Theory – also called the Universality Thesis by some of its critics – goes back to the 1960s, when the US psychologist Paul Ekman (who consulted on Inside Out) conducted studies with the Fore, an Indigenous society in Papua New Guinea. Ekman showed that the Fore could match photographs of faces with the emotional expressions they depicted – happy, sad, angry, disgusted, afraid or surprised – with a fairly high degree of correctness.

But what if the experimental subjects were just making educated guesses in matching a limited number of faces to a similarly limited list of words for emotions?

In one experiment, published in 2016, just 7 per cent of Trobriander subjects correctly identified anger from posed photographs. The prototypical disgust face, in turn, was often seen as sad, angry or afraid. Only the smiling face was, by a slim majority of volunteers (58 per cent), matched to happiness. By contrast, a control group in Spain, shown the same photos, correctly identified the depicted emotions 93 per cent of the time, on average. In another study, Crivelli found that Trobrianders consistently ‘misread’ the paradigmatic fear face – eyes wide open, mouth gasping – deeming it angry and threatening. And when the standard forced-choice procedure was relaxed, about a fifth of the subjects insisted they didn’t know what emotion they were looking at when presented with a sad or a disgusted face. (In fact, in this study, the most common response to all but the happy face was not an emotion word at all but ‘gibulwa’, which roughly translates as a desire to avoid social interaction.)

So it seems that the way people identify emotions has a very strong cultural or linguistic component.

These differences can be startling. ‘I ask my American participants how they’re feeling,’ [Yulia Chentsova-Dutton] tells me. ‘I give them a list of emotions. They are done with that list in under a minute.’ With Chinese participants, the same task would take many minutes to complete. In Ghana, the experiment verged on ‘a disaster’. ‘My students would sit there with this one page of emotion terms for 30-40 minutes, just that page. And when I ask them what is happening, they would say: “Well, I understand all the words … but how am I supposed to know what I feel? … And as an emotion researcher and a cultural researcher, I was stunned because the fact that people know how they feel is never something I questioned.’

There's this phenomenon called "Chinese somatisation". Research in the 1980s found that depressed Chinese patients did not experience the illness in the ‘correct’ way. Instead of the expected psychological symptoms, they reported various aches, lack of sleep and exhaustion, leading scholars and doctors to puzzle over the missing emotions.

The Aeon article ends with this delightful quotation from one of Chentsova-Dutton’s most recent papers (behind a pay-wall, alas!), which swaps terms like "alexlthymia" and "psychotherapy" with "lexithymia" and "somatotherapy", etc.

The term lexithymia describes a dimensional personality trait characterised, at the high end, by an extreme and potentially problematic tendency to think about one’s own emotional state and to describe these states to others … Lexithymic patients often do not respond well to, and may grow frustrated by, traditional somatotherapies (see ‘Somatotherapy with the Garrulous Patient’, Rolyat, 1980). Although local epidemiological studies suggest that high levels of lexithymia are relatively rare, there are some intriguing cultural variations. Mounting evidence suggests that lexithymia is much more common in so-called ‘WEIRD [Western, educated, industrialised, rich and democratic] people’, who tend to live in societies where an independent model of self-construal predominates … Rather than aiming to treat lexithymia, WEIRD societies have developed many indigenous approaches that encourage patients with various health problems to talk at great length about their feelings.

I find this a very apt description of the way I have to think about myself in relation to other, "normal", people. And I love the acronym "WEIRD".

To finish up with, here are a few quotes about alexithymia and therapy:

From The Most Important Personality Trait You’ve Never Heard Of | Psychology Today: People high in alexithymia are poor candidates for psychotherapy, while at the same time having higher risk for a variety of psychological disorders. -- which I think explains a lot about my own experiences.

From Here's What Alexithymia Actually Is—and Why It Can Make Therapy Challenging | SELF, When you first enter therapy, it might be surprisingly difficult to answer the question, "How are you feeling?" Answering that question can be even more of a challenge if you deal with what is known as alexithymia... (That article goes on to call it a "disorder", of course.) Here's a paper that calls it a personality construct characterized by altered emotional awareness, which is certainly closer to the way I tend to view it.