Talking about your feelings? Weird.

October 8, 2021 6:28 AM

The term lexithymia describes a dimensional personality trait characterised, at the high end, by an extreme and potentially problematic tendency to think about one’s own emotional state and to describe these states to others … Lexithymic patients often do not respond well to, and may grow frustrated by, traditional somatotherapies (see ‘Somatotherapy with the Garrulous Patient’, Rolyat, 1980). Although local epidemiological studies suggest that high levels of lexithymia are relatively rare, there are some intriguing cultural variations. Mounting evidence suggests that lexithymia is much more common in so-called ‘WEIRD [Western, educated, industrialised, rich and democratic] people’, who tend to live in societies where an independent model of self-construal predominates … Rather than aiming to treat lexithymia, WEIRD societies have developed many indigenous approaches that encourage patients with various health problems to talk at great length about their feelings.

Quoting a paper by Yulia E. Chentsova-Dutton, Elitsa Dermendzhiyska writes in Aeon on the subject of emotions: is there a set of innate and universal basic emotions, as one prevalent anglophone model would have it? Or would that be WEIRD?

Previously

posted by rd45 (23 comments total)

Most Americans, for instance, felt ashamed when their personal flaws were revealed, a pattern consistent with a culture that places high importance on the individual. For the Japanese, on the other hand, situations that exposed one’s own failings not only did not cause shame, they were not taken very seriously at all. Instead, congruent with their interdependent cultural values, it was losing face in public that shamed the majority of Japanese subjects.

Can someone elaborate on this for me? I would have thought losing face and having your personal flaws revealed were pretty much the same thing, but they are presented here as quite opposite things. So I think I don't understand what it means to lose face.

And as an emotion researcher and a cultural researcher, I was stunned because the fact that people know how they feel is never something I questioned.

I thought this was interesting, because one of the things I tried to address in my brief attempt at therapy is that actually, I'm very bad at knowing how I feel. All negative emotions have pretty much the same physiological effects on me, so I have difficulty distinguishing them. I can pick apart the causes of the emotional change and determine in an analytic way what I must be feeling, but that doesn't seem like the same thing as actually knowing how I feel, you know?
posted by jacquilynne at 6:50 AM on October 8, 2021 [9 favorites]

I thought this was interesting, because one of the things I tried to address in my brief attempt at therapy is that actually, I'm very bad at knowing how I feel. All negative emotions have pretty much the same physiological effects on me, so I have difficulty distinguishing them. I can pick apart the causes of the emotional change and determine in an analytic way what I must be feeling, but that doesn't seem like the same thing as actually knowing how I feel, you know?

Might be interesting to you to investigate the opposite of the thing in this post, alexithymia.
posted by curious nu at 7:36 AM on October 8, 2021 [1 favorite]

It is interesting though, that if the idea that emotions do have a much stronger cultural component than previously suspected in the West, then how things like alexithymia and the way emotions and autism spectrum disorder have been considered may also need to be rethought.
posted by gusottertrout at 8:21 AM on October 8, 2021 [10 favorites]

One behaviourist meets another, says "You're fine, how am I?".

I'm reminded of colour in language: the way that cultures divide and describe the spectrum is different, but there is a consistent pattern. I wonder if happiness is like the "red" of emotions, and most cultures will have similar one, where embarrassment is more like a turqouise and will be lumped in to blue most of the time.
posted by Wrinkled Stumpskin at 10:14 AM on October 8, 2021 [14 favorites]

> I would have thought losing face and having your personal flaws revealed were pretty much the same thing, but they are presented here as quite opposite things. So I think I don't understand what it means to lose face.

An example of losing face would be somebody pulling your pants down in public. Even if your body is flawless, your style is on point, and regardless of whether you had done anything to instigate the pantsing, your lower half still got exposed at a moment you didn't want it to happen.
posted by at by at 10:32 AM on October 8, 2021

The article seems to conflate how easily people can answer questions posed to them in studies with how they actually identify and experience emotions. Has anyone ever studied that if you grow up doing the kind of matching worksheet exercises that we do all through elementary school while learning nothing and doing nothing then you will just do more matching worksheet exercises the same way for $20 so you can eat food in college. If you grew up actually learning skills and how to exist in the world you'll respond differently. I don't think any ideas about how we experience & express emotions are proved or disproved by any of this.
posted by bleep at 10:41 AM on October 8, 2021 [2 favorites]

Can someone elaborate on this for me? I would have thought losing face and having your personal flaws revealed were pretty much the same thing, but they are presented here as quite opposite things. So I think I don't understand what it means to lose face.

I am far from an expert on any of this, but the cited paper has a figure, "Table A2. Shame Situation Vignettes" that measures two dimensions: agency and location. Agency being self or other, and location being personal flaws or public face. I think at by is correct here. You can lose public face for reasons that aren't personal flaws. One of the Shame Situation Vignettes is sitting on chewing gum in class, and other students seeing it and laughing. No personal flaw there, really. The personal flaws revelations seem to be just between two people. An example being a mother telling her daughter she hadn't lived up to expectations. No one informed outside of those two.

Now I feel like making my own table of personal Shame Situation Vignettes and thinking about them endlessly while trying to fall asleep. I guess... it's part of my culture.
posted by Mister Cheese at 10:45 AM on October 8, 2021 [6 favorites]

thank you so much for introducing me to the concept of WEIRD (which fills in some spaces in thoughts that have been flitting through my mind for a long time)
posted by supermedusa at 11:55 AM on October 8, 2021

I didn't grow up in the US (am from India), but am now bringing up my children in US. One thing I've noticed is that Americans always seem to be ready to talk about how they feel, and can really go on at length about it, in a way that was really not encouraged in Indian society. My parents would refer to it as "emoting" and were generally of the belief that talking about one's emotions too much had a way of bringing them into being. For a long time, under the pervasive influence of Western media, I resisted this view (how could there be anything wrong with talking about one's emotions and understanding oneself better?) but over time I've come around at least partially to their point of view. Dwelling too long on something negative does have a way of making it more central to your identity and thus more concrete.

It's funny to watch my little 4 year old be indoctrinated in American ways of talking about feelings - in preschool they've been working with emotion cards, and matching various feelings to the cards. The feelings used are exactly the ones mentioned in this article. For me, despite 10 years in the US, the faces are not clear-cut one way or the other. With labels, they seem obvious, but for example the disgust face could be read in multiple ways to me. Likewise surprise and fear are pretty blurry to me. And certainly I wouldn't expect someone who was actually surprised to make that stereotypical rounded mouth O face - that seems like an obvious exaggeration - in real life, surprise is a lot more subtle.
posted by peacheater at 12:12 PM on October 8, 2021 [26 favorites]

Americans always seem to be ready to talk about how they feel

Maybe that's changed, but when I was a child, any emotion stronger than Stern Disapproval was discouraged.
posted by Greg_Ace at 1:53 PM on October 8, 2021 [5 favorites]

I think there is significant variation within WEIRD societies or even WEIRD nations on this trait. I'm born and raised in northern California and, once I overcome my natural inclination towards social anxiety, my default mode is oversharing my emotional reactions.

I have a couple of friends from Iowa, and they find it uncomfortable and frankly weird to talk about themselves directly at all, let alone their internal emotional states.
posted by murphy slaw at 2:01 PM on October 8, 2021 [10 favorites]

I’ve been thinking about when and where it changed in the US too. My parents were born during WWII and definitely raised to not discuss emotions or, ideally, the self. They loosened up a lot when raising me and my brother but not to the point of emoting being necessary or innately admirable, just - open for consideration under an ethical framework.

I don’t know how I’d have raised kids.
posted by clew at 2:33 PM on October 8, 2021 [2 favorites]

I'm the American child of Indian immigrants (so, a few decades ahead of peacheater's 4 year old), and "emoting" was definitely not encouraged at home or in the classroom. Which is not to say any of us are buttoned up and stoic -- there was always plenty of Family Drama to go around -- but sitting around and talking about feeeeeelings, as I presume one does in therapy, is an alien concept. In fact, I've often felt that Metafilter's default "have you tried therapy" suggestion is off-base for a lot of people/situations. I have had things happen in my life where talking about them would not have helped in the slightest and would have made feel even worse -- and this article helps me articulate why that is.

But! My Gen Z students are super into this stuff, so perhaps it's more a generational than a geographic thing. It seems like we start every small group with a "centering activity" with one word about "how you are feeling today."
posted by basalganglia at 3:29 PM on October 8, 2021 [8 favorites]

I remember not being able to reflect on my emotions at all as a little kid — I was my emotions. And I was an extremely wild and dangerous little kid.

But that changed when I learned to read in the third grade, and I was able to control myself much better after that, as well as being able to name internally what I was feeling at the time I was feeling it. But I also felt a decline in the immediacy of experience and a loss of engagement with the world.

When I developed a large left hemisphere subdural hematoma over a few weeks in my late 40s (my neurosurgeon said 'when I show people your scan, no one believes you weren’t in a coma!'), I became a lot like I was before I learned to read, and my use of language changed. All pauses, hesitations and fillers such as 'uh', 'you know' and 'like' completely vanished, and I had no advance warning of what I was going to say when I opened my mouth to speak. My speech was rapid, highly metaphorical, emotional and unrestrained by social niceties though not at all profane. I just cannot remember whether I did much reading during those weeks.

As was suggested by the Pixar anecdote at the beginning of the article, we WEIRDos are teaching kids to recognize and talk about their own emotions as a step on a path to controlling them, and most crucially as a means to develop a self which stands behind those emotions and can use them for their individual goals and needs.

In contrast to societies which appear to me to put the locus of control of emotion in the hands of larger collective entities such as the family, church, a village, or even society as a whole, and for which an individual's recognition of their own emotions would be unnecessary and probably even counterproductive — you can row your own little boat however you like as long as you get where you’re going (and if your boat sinks that will just leave more for the boats that do arrive), but if you’re on a galley, you have to be in sync with the other rowers.
posted by jamjam at 5:51 PM on October 8, 2021 [14 favorites]

I'm really curious what the exact questions were in some of the studies mentioned. e.g.

He said they reminded him of a study he did with Japanese subjects in which he asked them how they felt. His question baffled some participants. It depends, they said: what would the other person do?

I'm WEIRD and on the face of it I'd respond the same way. I mean, how I feel about an incident is going to be affected by how other people react, obviously.
posted by airmail at 6:24 PM on October 8, 2021 [2 favorites]

@jamjam Great comment (actually really good thread, too). Out of curiosity, hematoma location: frontal lobe probably but where specifically? If you choose to share that is
posted by DeepSeaHaggis at 10:50 PM on October 8, 2021

And certainly I wouldn't expect someone who was actually surprised to make that stereotypical rounded mouth O face - that seems like an obvious exaggeration

You clearly need to watch more reaction videos. /s
posted by gusottertrout at 10:57 PM on October 8, 2021

I deliberately did not look at the scan, DeepSeaHaggis, because I wanted to preserve a degree of optimism about the possible extent of my recovery. But the surgeon said it centered on the regions that would have been the primary language associated regions of the brain in many people, so temporal, I got the impression. By the time I got to the hospital my right leg could no longer make the proper motions of walking, and I couldn’t write. He also said it was the largest hematoma he'd operated on in his 20 year career by a considerable margin.
posted by jamjam at 12:22 AM on October 9, 2021

Given the implied size, it could have been straddling the central sulcus - hence the general motor effects - and messed with both your anterior and posterior language areas. Awesome! Love hearing that Phinneas Gage shiz
posted by DeepSeaHaggis at 1:28 AM on October 9, 2021

I'm not generally a terribly impulsive person, and I'm fairly good at rationalizing things. So when I was a teenager, I used to consider myself somewhat less emotional than others and often felt downright alienated by too much emphasis on emotions. As I got older, however, I observed that people who describe themselves as particularly rational often just seem particularly lacking in self-awareness/particularly committed to being in denial/even more at the mercy of their emotions than anyone else. So yes, "pay attention to your emotions so you'll be better able to regulate them" was clearly my take-away too. Naming things gives you power over them. It's a bit of magical thinking, fairy-tale-logic applied to real life, but it often works.

And it has argueably served me somewhat well so far. But getting even older now, I also realize that feeling in complete control over your emotions - whether by denying them in the first place or by perfectly domesticating them through self-regulation - is a bit of a pipe dream. Sometimes I'll just have to accept that I'm at the mercy of my emotions, whatever precisely they may be and I'm not sure the alternative would even be preferable. Because sure, the mere act of observing somethings always changes it. I have talked myself into things, I have talked myself out of things, I know that it works and even somewhat how it works. But should I do it just because I can? At the end every choice is emotional, no matter the degree of deliberation - giving in to one emotion and letting go of another. Being more deliberate about it provides a feeling of agency, but that's after alll just another emotional need. I've also seen that sometimes emotions will just go away on their own if I do nothing about them at all, and that hasn't always been the worst choice either.

While not paying attention to your emotions at all can come back to bite you at the most inopportune moment, which is a risk I'd never feel comfortable taking, I also feel there's absolutey a degree of talking about your emotions (whether to yourself or others) that can be counter-productive. Firstly, I can't see why any and all my emotions should merit the same amount of attention. I may feel some emotions that are ugly and petty and small: a jolt of Schadenfreude, some pangs of jealousy, the smug satisfaction of thinking "I told you so!" - it's useful to acknowledge that to myself, so that I can watch my mouth, and also appropriately humbling, and a good thing to remember whenever I'm tempted to feel very morally superior to someone, but there are definitely diminishing returns to thinking about it beyond that. I think that people can get trapped in a need to always feel the right things about something, judge themselves too much about their feelings, or maybe identify themselves too much with their feelings, in way that just causes a lot of unproductive guilt and shame and self-loathing that ulitmately serves no one.

Secondly paying attention to your emotion =/= not always necessarily talking about your emotions. Language is sometimes such a poor instrument and can be distorting too. I'm fairly verbal, and like to read fiction, so I generally don't lack vocabulary. But even so trying to express profound emotions in words to others usually goes as well for me as one generally might expect, that is badly. It always seems to come out wrong, doesn't it? There's only so much words can do, and I say that as a big fan of words. And sure, poor attempts can be better than none, but still, maybe some people just don't talk as much about emotions because they have found better ways to communicate them.
posted by sohalt at 2:17 AM on October 9, 2021 [6 favorites]

Dwelling too long on something negative does have a way of making it more central to your identity and thus more concrete.

That's pretty much the central rationale behind CBT.
posted by flabdablet at 7:33 AM on October 9, 2021

When I was on the school board, one of the things that the school psychologists talked to us about was that in a lot of subsections of American society, the only acceptable negative emotion for boys, and sometimes men, to express is anger. They aren't allowed to say, "I'm hurt, I'm scared, I'm upset, I'm sad, I'm frustrated, I'm anxious." Those are all seen as weak, and unsafe to express because they might make you a target. So the only emotion they're allowed to express is, "I'm pissed, I'm angry, I'm furious, I'm mad."

And then the next step from that is, if you're angry, how do you respond to that? A lot of people might respond by turning their anger inward and becoming self-destructive; other people might respond by trying to control or squash down their anger. But a lot of us, when we're pissed off, we want to strike back at whatever pissed us off. Or whomever pissed us off.

And especially if masculinity is heavily predicated on ideas of strength and weakness, and boys are not allowed to express any negative emotions except anger, it makes a hell of a lot of sense to punch whoever pisses you off. That way you are both dealing with the anger, and showing strength, at a moment when you are afraid that you might be weak, or seen as weak.

There were some remarkably effective programs for helping kids who struggled with physically acting out to feel their emotions in their body -- are they shaking, is their stomach clenched, do they feel like they might throw up, are they seeing red? -- recognize that their emotions are expressed as much in their body as in their mind, and that listening to your body helps both because it might help you identify what's wrong but also because it's easier to call yourself down if you realize that your stomach freaks out when you're anxious. And then as they get better and naming what's happening in their body, you take the next step to teaching them a lot of different emotional words other than anger and how they can express what they're feeling more clearly. Like, we would get a kid who was acting out because his grandpa had died, and so he was super pissed and striking out at everything around him. And the social worker could kind of lead him through feeling what he was feeling in his body and then when he had calmed down a little bit talk about what those feelings he was feeling actually were, and frequently he could say then in that safe space, "I'm really sad" and "I'm really lonely" and "I'm really pissed at him for dying." Unless like 47 steps forward from my grandpa died, I'm pissed, I'm going to flip the desk over of the kid next to me to express my anger. Now we've got a kid who's body is panicking and freaking out and the kid is listening to his body instead of acting on what it's doing, and then thinking about what is driving those physical reactions and is able to put names to it, and not just one name: I'm sad, I'm grieving. But he was able to put three words to it He's sad because his grandfather died, he's lonely cuz he misses him, and he's pissed because death sucks. And a lot of the time that kid was able to return to class and be like, "sorry man, I'm just really sad that my grandpa died and I'm really pissed that he had to die and so I've just been kind of being pissed at everything but you didn't have anything to do with it so I shouldn't have flipped your desk; I'm just really sad."

This article just made me really think about that a lot, and about how an American society being able to identify and name emotions can be actually a really crucial skill, and even though we really want people to be able to talk about their emotions, we're not always good at making space for people to do that, or teaching them how. The social emotional curriculum at my kids school is actually really fascinating to me, and they are learning a lot of things about feelings and managing them in healthy ways that people have my peer group I think had to learn by trial and error.

I would totally take the social emotional class if it was offered for adults. I'm very Midwestern, and I have certain emotions very comfortably publicly even loudly, but other emotions must be squished down with my squisher downer and never see the light of day. I have gotten better in middle age at least being able to recognize the emotions that Must Not Be Named or Admitted To. but it's kind of like, oh look! Now I can quantify how bad I am at talking about my emotions and an honest fashion! I want to color pictures about my feelings and draw frowny faces on them when I'm mad and tell my teacher about the time when I was really really mad cuz my husband didn't do the dishes. I feel like this would be very healthy for me.
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 10:08 PM on October 9, 2021 [9 favorites]

“The Many Faces of Global Trauma,” Khameer Kidia, The L.A. Review of Books, 10 July 2021
posted by ob1quixote at 7:18 AM on October 10, 2021 [3 favorites]