The work carried out in this project has yielded three main insights into the relationship between language and emotion within and across cultural boundaries. First (insight #1), cultures vary in their habitual ways of making meaning of everyday emotional experiences. Across cultures, people differ in what aspects of experience they attend to, as evidenced by what they include and emphasize in their narrative descriptions of these experiences. These differences suggest corresponding differences in how emotions are described and understood, with impacts for how (psychological) scientists study emotions and inter-cultural contact. These differences also go beyond the emotion words people use to label how they are feeling; indeed, people do not always focus on subjective feelings as a core part of emotion (e.g. they may focus on their actions instead). These insights come from qualitative analyses addressing objective 1 and are disseminated in an empirical paper at a top-tier journal in psychological science.
Second (insight #2), individuals vary in the range and spread of activities and contexts represented by their everyday emotional experiences. Within cultures, people differ in the number of different topics or themes they use when describing daily events. These themes (e.g. “eating”, “planning”, “socializing”, “working”) shed light onto what people attend to or focus on. Greater diversity of themes is positively associated with the experience of more nuanced and differentiated emotions (i.e. higher emotional granularity), which has been associated in my and others’ previous work with positive mental, physical, and relational health outcomes. The relationship between thematic (i.e. experiential) diversity and emotional granularity was present across multiple cultural samples, and therefore tells us something about the mechanisms by which people acquire, update, and implement their concepts for emotion over time and which ways may be associated with better real-world outcomes. These insights come from automated analyses addressing objectives 2 through 4 and are disseminated in an empirical paper at a top-tier journal in affective science.
Third (insight #3), existing research has on language and emotion is limited by its reliance on emotion words to compare cultures or classify individuals. For example, anthropologists often describe the inventory or taxonomy of emotion words available to a particular culture, and psychologists often try to predict people’s personalities or mental health symptoms from the emotion words they use. This research suggests that emotion, and affect more broadly, are critical to understanding how people make meaning of experience and interact with each other and the world. But emotion language is more than a set of labels. Other features of language (e.g. grammatical structures) can provide insight into the conceptual processes that create emotional experience and drive psychological science forward. These insights come from the literature review included in the deliverables. and are written up in a review paper to be disseminated to a broad audience in psychology and linguistics.
