What We Can Learn About Emotion by Talking With the Hadza
Abstract
Emotions are often thought of as internal mental states centering on individuals’ subjective feelings and evaluations. This understanding is consistent with studies of emotion narratives, or the descriptions people give for experienced events that they regard as emotions. Yet these studies, and contemporary psychology more generally, often rely on observations of educated Europeans and European Americans, constraining psychological theory and methods. In this article, we present observations from an inductive, qualitative analysis of interviews conducted with the Hadza, a community of small-scale hunter-gatherers in Tanzania, and juxtapose them with a set of interviews conducted with Americans from North Carolina. Although North Carolina event descriptions largely conformed to the assumptions of eurocentric psychological theory, Hadza descriptions foregrounded action and bodily sensations, the physical environment, immediate needs, and the experiences of social others. These observations suggest that subjective feelings and internal mental states may not be the organizing principle of emotion the world around. Qualitative analysis of emotion narratives from outside of a U.S. (and western) cultural context has the potential to uncover additional diversity in meaning-making, offering a descriptive foundation on which to build a more robust and inclusive science of emotion.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Pub Defense Publication
- Publication Date
- Jul 10, 2023
- Source ID
- 10.1177/17456916231178555
Entities
People
- Alyssa N. Crittenden
- Batja Mesquita
- Endeko S. Endeko
- Katie Hoemann
- Lisa Feldman Barrett
- Maria Gendron
- Shani Msafiri Mangola
- Èvelyne Dussault
Organizations
- Athinoula A. Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging
- Division of Behavioral and Cognitive Sciences
- Harvard Medical School
- Katholieke Universiteit Leuven
- Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions
- National Cancer Institute
- National Institute of Mental Health
- Northeastern University
- U.S. Army Research Institute for the Behavioral and Social Sciences
- University of Nevada, Las Vegas
- Yale University