Happy new year to you all. My resolutions this year were to use my phone less (bought a timed locked box) and be regular with my newsletter (hi!). I’m going to gracefully gloss past the fact that the first days of 2021 opened with whatever the fuck that was in Washington DC and with the UK becoming the most infected nation per capita in the world. Instead, I want to talk about happier things.
Specifically, what we mean when we say we feel happy. Or sad. Or any other emotion. The following is drawn from the intro to my thesis, so apologies for the citations.
What does it mean to be happy? On National Day in 2012 in China, there was a live news broadcast. The reporter walked up to a day labourer and asked him, are you happy? Ni Xingfule ma? He looked at her blankly and responded, bu, wo xing zeng[1] . The word for happiness here xing is a homophone also for ‘surname’ so he believes she is asking him, is your surname Fu? He responds, No, I’m called Zeng. The story immediately went viral on the Chinese internet as educated urbanites laughed at the mistake. However, it was revealing of the gulf that still remained between the classes in China. Mr. Zeng had never been asked before whether or not he was happy.
Happiness is more interrelated in China than elsewhere (i.e. far more entangled in relationships and related to their harmony, an idea that I will explore in a future newsletter). The idea that there is not a universal conception of happiness can be taken further. If happiness is not stable throughout cultures and times, then what about the phenomenological experience of happiness? While no-one had asked Mr. Zeng if he was happy, that surely does not imply that he had never felt joy or pleasure. What was not constant was the language that he used to speak out this subjective experience. My thesis, dealing as it does with mental health, personal development and psychotherapy, spends a lot of time discussing emotions. It is important therefore to describe how emotions are understood, and what their social function might be.
Typologies of emotions have existed for millennia. The Confucian text Liji lists seven feelings thought to be innate: joy, anger, sadness, fear, love, hate, and desire (Dahl 2020). In the renaissance period, some fifteen hundred years later, in France, Renee Descartes put forth his own theory of emotions. He listed wonder, love, hatred, desire, joy, and sadness as the six “primitive passions” (Dahl 2020). More recently, Paul Ekman (2007), a professor at UCSF, has written about the existence of seven ‘universal emotions’–––anger, contempt, disgust, enjoyment, fear, sadness, and surprise. Working across cultures he argues that these emotions are universal or ‘basic’ because of the way they are visible in micro-facial expressions (Ekman 2004). This conception of the existence of clearly distinguishable emotions that exist globally (and thus prior to culture) perhaps finds its most obvious pop-cultural expression in the Pixar movie Inside-Out, which shows the inner workings of a person controlled by actual emotional levers in their brain. Ekman was a consultant for that movie.
The idea of there being a ‘universal’ psyche that would see globally consistent emotional expressions however has been widely critiqued in recent years. The most prominent such critique is the argument that psychological studies generalize across populations despite the research focusing on a small set of people––which one group of scholars call WEIRD for being derived from a Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich and Democratic background (Heinrich et al 2010). This is because so many studies are conducted in academic institutions in the West and draw their research participants from the student bodies of those institutions, which skews the results. The results are presented as universal and exported, like a commodity. This process has been called “the globalization of the American psyche” by one critic (Watters 2010).
Moving beyond the biases in the psychological literature, recent scholarship attempts to show the cultural construction of emotions. In her book How Emotions are Made, Lisa Feldman Barrett (2017) a neuroscientist at North Eastern University, argues that while there are sensations which might be deemed universal, i.e. arousal or valence, the way that our mind makes sense of these sensations is cultural. In other words, emotions are the interpretations of sensations as determined by our personal histories, cultural context, expectations and language (Barrett 2017). The constructionist understanding of emotions therefore functions akin to the way that other stimuli have cultural expressions. Russians are able to distinguish between more shades of blue than Americans, because the Russian language has separate words for dark blue (siniy) and light blue (goluboy), making them more culturally attuned to their differences (Dahl 2020). North Americans and Europeans when presented with the odour of almonds will say it is sweet, because of the prevalence of foods such as marzipan in these cultures, whereas Japanese associate the smell of almonds with the salty taste of pickled condiments, and so define the odour as savoury (Spence 2013). In other words, while our brains may have universal capacities for stimulation, their interpretative capacities are cultured.
I’m currently writing an essay on how this works for flavour in cooking (what does it mean, for example, for an olive oil to be ‘peppery’ and how long would it take you to train to distinguish that accurately tldr; two years minimum). I do think it’s a beautiful idea, how we are always having to use this messy and inaccurate tool of language to try and speak out the messy and sometimes extremely hard to understand inner workings of our brain as we move through the world. There is of course an open question about the causal chain; does the sensitivity create the language or does the language increase the sensitivity? It’s probably both; Eskimos, who have dozens of words for snow, need a nuanced language to interact with their frosty environment. The existence of the language allows them to better communicate the subtle differences in snow textures, and therefore to recognise them from an earlier age. The sensitivity is thus reinforced and culturally embedded.
In the case of emotions, it’s worth thinking about how the rise of therapy and psychologized understandings of our emotional states has created a more nuanced language for our emotions. Maybe we are becoming the emotional equivalents of Russians looking at different colours; able to distinguish more clearly the boundaries between certain states. What does this cultural adaption say about our time and our environments?
Let me know what you think (or what emotions, if any, this conjured in you) by commenting below or emailing me!
[1] 幸福/姓副
Dahl, Melissa (2020) “If you can say it, you can feel it” The Cut accessed 31.3.2020
Spence, C. (2013). Multisensory integration & the psychophysics of flavour perception. In J. Chen & L. Engelen (Eds.) Food oral processing: Fundamentals of eating and sensory perception. Oxford: Blackwell.
Barrett, L. F. (2017). How emotions are made: The secret life of the brain. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
Ekman, P. (2007). Emotions revealed: recognizing faces and feelings to improve communication and emotional life. New York, Henry Holt.
Ekman P. (2004) Emotional and Conversational Nonverbal Signals. In: Larrazabal J.M., Miranda L.A.P. (eds) Language, Knowledge, and Representation. Philosophical Studies Series, vol 99. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-2783-3_3