What we can learn about emotion by talking with the Hadza

Instances of emotion are typically understood as internal mental experiences centering on individuals’ subjective feelings. This conceptualization has been supported by studies of emotion narratives, or the stories people tell about events that they understand 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 paper, we present observations from an inductive, qualitative analysis of emotion narratives of the Hadza, a community of small-scale hunter-gatherers in Tanzania, and juxtapose them with those drawn from Americans from North Carolina. While North Carolina narratives largely conformed to the assumptions of psychological theory, Hadza narratives foregrounded embodied actions involving social others, focused on the sensory environment and immediate needs, and worked outward from situated events as the motivation for behavior. These observations suggest that subjective feeling and internal mental experience may not be the organizing principle of emotion the world-around. Qualitative analysis of emotion narratives from outside of an American (and western) cultural context has the potential to discover additional diversity in meaning-making, offering a descriptive foundation on which to build a more robust and inclusive science of emotion.