Feelings in the body: Cultural variations in the somatic concomitants of affective experience.

Abstract

Affective science research has investigated how the sociocultural context shapes the bodily experience of emotion. Similarly, in the culture and mental health literature, there is a history of research on cultural variations in the presentation of somatic symptoms. A well-known example of the latter is the finding that Chinese depressed patients report more somatic symptoms compared to their “Western” counterparts. The present study represents a first step toward integrating these efforts. We examined reports of somatic and affective changes in 48 Chinese/Chinese American (CH) and 53 European American (EA) women responding to a sad film. Although CH and EA women reported experiencing similar levels of sadness, CH women experienced higher levels of somatic sensations (e.g., changes in heartbeat) relative to EA women. CH participants’ reports of somatic changes were negatively associated with orientation to American culture. These findings suggest that cultural context shapes the subjective experience of somatic changes associated with sadness.

What We Can Learn About Emotion by Talking With the Hadza

“…When we provided Hadza participants with the opportunity to tell us about a second, more distant and intense or significant event, we still did not receive responses like the North Carolina descriptions. Parallelism with previous findings (e.g., Chentsova-Dutton et al, 2020;Mesquita, 2001;Wang & Conway, 2004) gives further weight and depth to our observations. The existence of similar cultural differences across several experiential domains (e.g., perception, health, emotion, memory) runs counter to the idea that we would have gotten the same answers if only we had asked the same questions.…”

“…One apparent cultural difference is the relative emphasis given to bodily versus mental experience (e.g., Chentsova-Dutton et al, 2020 ; Dzokoto, 2010 ; Dzokoto et al, 2013 ). We observed that Hadza participants tended to ground their event descriptions with behaviors and sensations, whereas North Carolina participants built their descriptions around thoughts and feelings.…”

What we can learn about emotion by talking with the Hadza

“…In illustrating broad contrasts between Hadza and North Carolina emotion narratives, the present paper joins prior research in suggesting that the conceptualization of experience varies by culture (e.g., L. F. Barrett et al, 2007;Kitayama et al, 2000;Pavlenko, 2006). One apparent cultural difference is the relative emphasis given to bodily versus mental experience (e.g., Chentsova-Dutton et al, 2020;Dzokoto, 2010). We observed that Hadza participants tended to ground their events with descriptions of behaviors and sensations, whereas North Carolina participants built their stories around thoughts and feelings.…”

Beyond Linguistic Relativity, Emotion Concepts Illustrate How Meaning is Contextually and Individually Variable

“…Cultures differ in which emotion concepts are available and in which features are highlighted (Hoemann et al, 2022;Lillard, 1998;Russell, 1991). Culture affects how emotion is grounded in the body (Chentsova-Dutton et al, 2020;Dzokoto, 2010;Huang, 2002;Pavlenko, 2002) and in social relationships (Beatty, 2019;Boiger et al, 2014;Mesquita, 2001Mesquita, , 2022Semin et al, 2002). Compared to other semantic domains, the meanings of emotion words are not well aligned across languages, and what alignment there is only weakly correlates with measures of cultural similarity (Thompson et al, 2020).…”