by Juha Lahnakoski and Ellie Bennett at Psyche: (H)ave you ever stopped to wonder whether the way you experience emotion in your body is the same as someone raised in a different culture on the other side of the planet, or during a different historical period?
At least some aspects of the way emotions are embodied seem to be universal, suggesting this is a basic part of human biology.For instance, when our colleagues asked people to describe where they felt specific emotions by painting them on a template of a body, the participants displayed a lot of consensus – they tended to agree that pride is felt around the chest, anger in the arms and fists, and so on. In fact, by using the participants’ responses to create bodily heat maps of emotional feeling, the researchers were able to look at a map and differentiate between the six basic emotions (happiness, anger, fear etc) and even different types of love, such as the love you feel for your romantic partner, your parents, or your country.
A study using a similar approach, but involving thousands of people from 101 countries around the world, also showed great consistency in people’s responses, suggesting that the pattern of bodily sensations triggered by emotions is similar across cultures. These findings imply that there is a shared biological mechanism underlying the bodily sensations we describe while experiencing emotions.
This makes intuitive sense. Our emotions ultimately emerge from the brain and body, so it follows that the feelings they provoke are a fundamental feature of human biology. But that’s not necessarily the whole story.
Another important factor might be that bodily sensations are affected by culture and language. For instance, in English, people easy to anger are called ‘hot-headed’, and the connection between heat and anger has been seen across different cultures. But this does not necessarily mean that when study participants’ temperatures are taken there would be a noticeable rise in body temperature preceding aggression. Temperature data in humans in aggressive situations is hard to come by, but, in pheasants at least, aggression is actually preceded by a drop in head temperatures. It is sometimes difficult to separate the true bodily sensations experienced during emotions from the cultural tropes that we’ve learned to associate with those emotions.
It is intriguing to ponder whether the different ways emotions are discussed by different cultures and languages could shape people’s bodily experiences of emotions. Yet, in the current times of worldwide intercultural interactions, often disproportionately influenced by the English language, it is challenging to find truly independent populations because many idioms have spread across multiple modern languages. For this reason, we and our colleagues took a radical approach – we turned our attention to ancient times.
More here.
