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.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
