Happiness in the Eye and the Heart: Somatic Referencing in West African Emotion Lexica

Abstract

Although many theories about the structure of emotion have been developed, none of them seem to adequately explain the African experience. This study examined the folk emotion lexica of two indigenous West African languages. Fifty monolingual Fante speakers and 50 monolingual Dagbani speakers from rural and semirural Ghana participated in focus groups to generate words in their native language that they use to describe experiences that involve emotions. Qualitative analysis of the emotion lexica generated by the focus group participants revealed frequent somatic referencing in the emotion talk of Fante and Dagbani, although there were differences in the specific body parts mentioned in references to various emotional experiences. The ubiquity of somatic referents in the expression of African emotions suggests that future theories of emotion structure may need to incorporate the concept of embodiment.For more than a century, beginning with William James (1890/1950), psychology has been interested in the nature of emotion and has produced

Their Hands Have Lost Their Bones: Exploring Cultural Scripts in Two West African Affect Lexica

“…We initially considered conducting a replication of Dzokoto and Okazaki (2006), which used primarily a focus group format. In their study, a total of 100 volunteer monolingual speakers of either Fante (spoken in Southern Ghana) or Dagbani (spoken in Northern Ghana) generated words in Fante or Dagbani that they used to describe emotional experiences.…”

“…This method yielded an emotion lexica of less than 20 emotion terms in each language, despite each participant being repeatedly asked to nominate as many emotion terms as they could. Though we are confident that the Fante and Dagbani emotion lexica lists generated in Dzokoto and Okazaki's (2006) research exhaustively captured the everyday experience of emotional labeling that readily came to mind for respondents, we hoped to capture a larger scope of affective experiences in the languages selected for the present study. Therefore, this method of emotion word generation was rejected in the current analysis.…”

“…Previous research has demonstrated the dominance of embodiment in some West African emotion lexica (Dzokoto and Okazaki 2006). However, these findings only examined Akan Fante-a Kwa language spoken in Southern Ghana, and Dagbani-a Gur language spoken in Northern Ghana.…”

“…The author suggests that the common combination of "aleme" with other feeling terms to refer to a wide range of emotions (fear, worry sadness, dislike, anger, jealousy, happiness) reflects a culturally shared perception of a bodily response in the stomach during these emotional experiences. The Kuot of Papua New Guinea also include the stomach and skin in a range of emotion terms (Lindström 2002), while Fante and Dagbani speakers' emotion terms most commonly reference the eye and the heart, respectively (Dzokoto and Okazaki 2006).…”

Considering the cultural context in psychopathology formulations

“…[4] Numerous theories focused on the composition of emotion do not illustrate the African experience effectively. [5] To illustrate such experiences, there appears to be a need for thorough assessment of cultural views on psychopathology. However, the need to explore cultural conceptualisations of psychopathology is not new.…”