Periodic Reporting for period 1 - CONCEPT FIT (Emotional fit within and between cultural contexts: Analyzing natural language to describe and compare the conceptual system for emotions)
Periodo di rendicontazione: 2020-10-01 al 2022-09-30
The frequencies, intensities, and types of emotions people experience in each situation differ systematically across cultural boundaries. This variation is inherently meaningful because it reflects differences in the conceptual system for emotions, with implications for well-being. Emotional fit between individuals and other members of their culture is a protective factor for mental and physical health, as is a well-developed conceptual repertoire for emotions. Although language is often used to understand the conceptual system for emotions, this work has remained limited by theories that focus on emotion words at the expense of other features of language, and methods that do not allow for discovery-oriented analysis. In this research project, I address these limitations by describing the conceptual system for emotions in Dutch-speaking Belgians using a qualitative (objective 1) and automated (objective 2) analysis of natural language. I then perform a cross-cultural comparison with English speakers from the US (objective 3) and derive a natural language-based measure of emotional fit between individuals and their fellow culture members (objective 4). I also review the psychological and linguistic literature for previous approaches to analyzing emotion language and propose methods to move the field forward. Together, the objectives of this project expand the understanding of emotional experience and its intersection with language, culture, and well-being.
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.
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.
The insights gained through this project move the state of the art forward theoretically by considering how fundamental cultural differences in emotion concepts impact the theories and methods used to study emotion (insight #1), how individual differences in the content of daily life may actively shape and reflect emotion concepts (insight #2), and how language can be used as an integrated system of meaning to gain deeper understanding of emotion concepts (insight #3).
The work undertaken in this project also advances the state of the art methodologically by showing how automated approaches to natural language analysis such as topic modeling can be used on smaller, more targeted data sets. Prior research has almost exclusively used a ‘big data’ approach, applying natural language processing techniques to language corpora, social media, or other crowd-sourced data sets that are far larger than many researchers can feasibly collect. In this project, I demonstrated that versions of these techniques can be fruitfully applied to interviews and brief descriptions of experience. Moreover, I applied these techniques to spoken language data, and data collected in Dutch, when the default of most studies is written English.
The potential applied impact of this project is particularly evident in relation to cross-cultural communication and migration. The present findings imply that everyday language is a means of transmitting and acquiring cultural understanding of emotion (insights #1 and #3). Similarly, by examining the degree to which patterns of language use are predictive of adaptive emotional functioning (insight #2), the findings of this project can help address the challenge posed to society by mental health disorders. A better understanding of emotion language use can inform general education as well as future studies for improving mental health via emotional fit.
The work undertaken in this project also advances the state of the art methodologically by showing how automated approaches to natural language analysis such as topic modeling can be used on smaller, more targeted data sets. Prior research has almost exclusively used a ‘big data’ approach, applying natural language processing techniques to language corpora, social media, or other crowd-sourced data sets that are far larger than many researchers can feasibly collect. In this project, I demonstrated that versions of these techniques can be fruitfully applied to interviews and brief descriptions of experience. Moreover, I applied these techniques to spoken language data, and data collected in Dutch, when the default of most studies is written English.
The potential applied impact of this project is particularly evident in relation to cross-cultural communication and migration. The present findings imply that everyday language is a means of transmitting and acquiring cultural understanding of emotion (insights #1 and #3). Similarly, by examining the degree to which patterns of language use are predictive of adaptive emotional functioning (insight #2), the findings of this project can help address the challenge posed to society by mental health disorders. A better understanding of emotion language use can inform general education as well as future studies for improving mental health via emotional fit.