In the 1980s, there was a burst of research on how people told stories about emotion; social scientists wanted to understand how people react to common experiences. Their subjects described clammy hands on a first date, clenched jaws during a final exam, road rage while sitting in traffic. From this collection of stories, researchers created a map of sorts—where certain situations and behaviors corresponded to specific emotions (like anger, joy, and sadness).
The only problem was that almost all the people surveyed were students from North America and Western Europe. What we knew about the experience of emotion and how people talked about it came from a relatively small slice of the global population. And as a result, we had a limited understanding of how some cultures made meaning differently than others.
As a team of researchers focused on cross-cultural emotion, we wanted to help close this gap. So in November 2016, we traveled to a remote part of northern central Tanzania to study how a community of hunter–gatherers told stories. We were interested in how these community members, known as the Hadza, described their experiences of emotion, and how those descriptions diverged from Western standards.
It immediately stood out to us that the Hadza stories often highlighted physical experience—bodily sensations and movements.
In our research recently published in Perspectives on Psychological Science (open access), we juxtaposed these Hadza conversations with a similar set of interviews with Americans to explore the stories people tell about emotion. Our findings suggest that these cultural groups do not organize emotion in the same way. What’s more, the differences we observed are not adequately captured by traditional approaches to understanding emotion. How people talk—and think—about their emotions can influence social interactions and relationships, the success of therapeutic or medical treatment, and the outcomes of institutional and judicial processes. Without tools that allow for nuance and diversity in the understanding of emotion, we may miss what others are trying to say.
During our visit to Tanzania, we interviewed 94 Hadza adults in teams of Hadzane- and English-speaking researchers. Our interviewees recalled a recent time they felt pleasant or unpleasant, and then answered questions like “Where were you?,” “What happened?,” and “How did you feel about it?” It immediately stood out to us that the Hadza stories often highlighted physical experience—bodily sensations and movements. For example, one middle-aged woman described not being paid for a job with reference to her heart, head, and hands:
“My heart is beating very fast until my head is pounding, because I’m using so much power while working hard, because I expected I would get something for it. But I got nothing.… When someone refuses to pay you, it’s like they cut your hands: because even if you go do other jobs, you worry the next guy also won’t pay you.”
When we got back home, we dug up a similar set of 41 interviews previously conducted with university students and community members in North Carolina. In contrast to the Hadza focus on physical sensations, these stories about emotion foregrounded mental experience—subjective feelings, inferences, and explanations. For example, in another story about work-related conflict, a middle-aged American woman emphasized her anger, her feelings of “unworthiness,” and the malintent of the person who slighted her:
“I was very angry, but unfortunately I never had any respect for this person anyway. She abused her power, she manipulated people, she … [thought] that all of the decisions that she made were the right ones. But the effect that she had on so many people was, well, so discouraging, and … she really liked to make you feel totally unworthy.”
Another thing we noticed is that Hadza stories about emotion attended to shared experience—the needs and perspectives of others. After a successful hunt, the young man below reported feeling joyful because he “knew [his] kids would be satisfied”:
“I waited for the impala to come close to where I was hiding, ready to hunt them. I was hiding by a big branch of the baobab so they could not see me. So, when they are starting to eat, and I started descending slowly and I started to shoot them … I was laughing so much because I had never killed an impala before. My whole life I had been trying to kill impala. This was a very lucky day for me.… I loved it so much because I knew my kids would be satisfied.”
Compare this to a quote from a young man in North Carolina whose account of his triumph over another type of big game was much more self-focused. He highlights the praise he received and his feature in the local paper—a self-described “ego-trip”:
“I played for our varsity basketball team, and we were playing one of our big rivals, and I ended up scoring, I don’t know, like 16 points in the last quarter, which basically won the game for us. I received a lot of praise for that, and then the next day in the newspaper it had a big article write-up about me, and the picture, and so … I felt praised, kind of an ego-trip.… I knew I would get a lot of recognition that night and have a lot of fun.”
Looking across both sets of interviews, we summarized our observations as a set of tendencies in Hadza and North Carolina stories about emotion. In addition to the focus on individual versus shared experience and mental versus physical sensation, we also noted differences in the way they talked about time, goals, and the motivations behind their behavior.
These differences build on a growing body of research that shows how stories about emotion, as any other narrative practice, are culturally shaped. There is no one way to talk about feelings—in fact, feelings might not even play a central role in how people make meaning of their experiences. As we saw from the Hadza, elements such as physical sensation and the impact on others can also take center stage.
The Hadza stories form a counterweight to much of the science on emotion to date, serving as a reminder that people in contemporary Western cultures may not be the norm. The implications for research are clear: if we are to capture the richness of human experience, we need to broaden our perspective. This means sampling a wider array of contexts, both in and outside the cultural West, and paying attention to the stories people tell. When we apply Western tools to the stories Hadza people tell, for example, their experiences appear to fall flat. Not because they are dull or unemotional, but because our methods don’t capture their richness. We need tools geared toward discovering variations rather than confirming expectations.
There are implications beyond research, too. How do therapists and counselors interact with patients who concentrate on physical more than mental experience? How do judges and juries evaluate victims and defendants who do not present themselves as we expect? As our everyday lives bring us in contact with an ever-broader spectrum of viewpoints and backgrounds, it is important to realize that these experiences and perspectives may come in different packages.
Research team statement: Community members (Msafiri and Endeko) and psychologists (Hoemann, KU Leuven; Gendron, Yale) collected data in the field, and were joined in planning and interpretation by an anthropologist with long time ties to the community (Crittenden, UNLV) and experts in culture and emotion (Barrett, Northeastern; Dussault and Mesquita, KU Leuven). This unique team composition represented a holistic, culturally appropriate, and community centered approach to interdisciplinary psychological research.
