Nietzsche’s French: On Whorfian Emotional Efficiency

Does reading how Nietzsche describes ressentiment change the way people experience feelings adjacent to jealously? He says: “they make evil-doers out of friend, wife, child and anyone else near to them. ‘I suffer: someone or other must be guilty’ – and every sick sheep thinks the same,” (Nietzsche, 2007, pg. 94) and with those words he both gives us a conceptual pitch for what these sorts of feelings are, while also giving us a (French) word to describe it. The idea that languages are able to describe unique emotions is not unique to French: “schadenfreude” in German describes the satisfaction of witnessing another’s suffering and the Dutch word “uitwaaien” is a feeling of calm which emerges on walks in the windy outdoors.

Two possibilities present themselves. First, that learning an emotion word is simply that, an addition to one’s lexicon. Emotions are emotions, and at best different forms of learning gives one rational coping tools to deal with them. If one learns the word “schadenfreude” and finds themselves experiencing it more often than they had before, that is the result of the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon. The alternative is that having a word for an emotion, in and of itself, makes some sort of change in how the emotion is experienced.

This debate has long been waged in psychology and neuroscience, framed as emotional essentialism vs. constructivism (Barrett, 2017). The essentialist stance is that feelings are hardwired brain functions which are universal across normal-functioning human beings. Constructivists believe that emotions are unique to individuals, as influenced by culture, and built by one’s conceptual framework. One aspect of constructivism which is Whorfian is the idea that having a lexical tag for an emotion concept alters one’s actual experience of the emotion itself (Lindquist, Barrett, Bliss-Moreau, & Russell, 2006). One central conjecture is the idea that having a tag makes emotion processing more efficient (Barrett, 2006), and because cognitive load is experiential (Ayres, 2006), an increase in efficiency would lead to a different experience in a particular emotion. Given work by neuroscientist Mark Solms, who claims that emotions are the primary way in which conscious organisms experience the world (2021), this aspect of constructivism would lend some credibility to the more dramatic claims Whorf gave of language defining our relative views of the world (1940).

There is strong evidence that “affect labeling,” that is, naming an emotion which is being experienced, changes the emotion process beyond what normal cognitive activity can do. One fMRI study, by Lieberman et al (2007), asked subjects to view a series of emotionally charged faces over a series of five different tasks (additionally, a control task of viewing shapes). Each face triggered an emotional response in the subjects, corresponding to limbic system activity in the brain, and this neural activity was measured in comparison to which task was being done. Whether one was matching faces to genders, matching faces, to other faces’ genders, or matching faces to similar emotions, no task was able to decrease amygdala activity in the same way as simply noting, verbally, which emotion was being expressed. Similar work, focusing on asking subjects about their personal experiences while emotion labeling, have found a marked decrease in distress when the practice is done (Lieberman, Inagaki, Tabibnia, & Crockett, 2011).

Distress is, of course, experiential and the neuroscientific and psychological studies agree: having a word for an emotion state can alter one’s qualitative experience and this change cannot be fully explained through a more generic claim of “cognitive activity.” If one is scientifically conservative, they can focus on the studies listed and which those exist elsewhere. More ambitiously, an excited constructivist may conclude that emotional Whorfianism is a universal assessment of how emotions work in the brain. However, this does not prove the more ambitious aspects of the lexical-emotional tie: claims that some cultures possess fully unique emotions (read: regardless of cognitive efficiency) (Spiegel, 2017) is to be determined.

I have found the essentialist critique of lexical labels to be fairly weak. One paper, written by Sauter, LeGuen, and Haun (2011) in support of Ekman’s idea of “basic emotions” (1992), published data on German and Yucatec Maya speakers on differentiation of emotions in the context of lexical categories. Yucatec Maya is a relatively unqiue language; it does not have separate words to for two of the universal emotions proported by essentialists (and many moderates in the essentialist/constructivist debate): disgust and anger. Someone speaking Yucatec Maya would describe the emotion of a man screaming at the TV or avoiding a dead animal carcass with the same words (p’eek, p’uha’an, or ts’ı´ik). This is not the case in German. A visual aid will help before I describe the task:

Figure 1

Researchers paired up three dichotomies of emotional expressions: disgust/anger, disgust/sadness, and anger/sadness. Each task involved only one pairing. Participants were shown the most extreme version of the pairing, and then shown a series of faces which expressed “in between” feelings and were asked to select which extreme face the current part of the series was closest to; they were then assessed by accuracy. The idea here is that if Yucatec Maya lack a lexical differentiation between disgust/anger linguistically (having a separate word from both for “sadness”) that some sort of special struggle in noticing the differences between disgust and anger faces should arrive one all three tasks get compared. The results? 

Figure 2

The team noted how there seemed to be a universal pattern of expression differentiation, regardless of lexical differences between speakers of the two languages. People seems to have an easier time matching very angry faces with the angriest face and a harder time doing the same for ambiguous faces. By this framework, it seems that emotions are innate.

There are four issues I can identify with applying this study as evidence against emotional Whorfianism (of the efficiency variety): 1) No control was put into place on people’s ability to differentiate emotions from information other than facial expressions (tone of voice, context, etc.); my ability to match up pictures may have nothing to do with my ability to experience or understand emotions 2) one major critique of the Ekmanian school of emotion (I borrow this argument from Barrett, 2017) is that scientists often train their subjects on the emotions in question before actually gathering any data (i.e. the extreme faces were shown to subjects and that dichotomy framed the entire experience for them) 3) not all the data in the anger/sad continuum hit statistical significance, meaning we should probably only be looking at disgust/anger and sad/disgust 4) when only looking at those two continuums, this seems like evidence for a Whorfian emotional efficiency; the terms which the Yucatec Maya had no lexical tag to differentiate them led them to worse performance than the Germans, but when the linguistic playing field was equal the two groups were equally effective at differentiating the faces.

So, does reading On the Genealogy of Morals give someone access to a new sort of emotion? Nietzsche would certainly say, “No.” He was under the impression that he was describing the experiences of the ignorant, across time and culture, and that all peoples of a certain type experienced ressentiment. However, the Whorfian emotional efficiency model may better align with Nietzsche’s goals and with the truth of how emotion processing works. When we study an emotion, say in a philosophy book, and gain a new word for it there is evidence that shows that when we apply this word (regardless of any other form of understanding) we can handle the situation with more cognitive efficiency. Different languages have different words for different emotions, and some languages lack labels for particular types of feelings. Because of this, one’s language (or languages) does impact one’s experience of the world via the emotions and by (at least) the cognitive load they place on us. However, Barrett (2017) notes that one does not need to study other languages to get the benefits of this Whorfian efficiency; by paying attention to our affective experience it is possible to create our own lexical tags to describe our emotional experiences, thereby gaining the benefits of the special role language plays in emotion processing. I call this specific emotional satisfaction of finishing an essay while flying over the Atlantic because the initial draft I wrote earlier in the week got deleted, “no plane no gain.”

References

Ayres, P. (2006). Using subjective measures to detect variations of intrinsic cognitive load within problems. Learning and instruction, 16(5): 389-400.

Barrett, L. F. (2006). Solving the Emotion Paradox: Categorization and the Experience of Emotion. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 10(1): 20-46.

Barrett, L. F. (2017). How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

Ekman, P. (1992). An Argument For Basic Emotions. Cognition and Emotion, 6(3/4): 169-200.

Lieberman, M. D., Eisenberger, N. I., Crockett, M. J., Tom, S. M., Pfeifer, J. H., & Way, B. M. (2007). Putting feelings into words. Psychological Science, 18(5): 421-428.

Lieberman, M. D., Inagaki, T. K., Tabibnia, G., & Crockett, M. J. (2011). Subjective responses to emotional stimuli during labeling, reappraisal, and distraction. Emotion, 11(3): 468-480.

Lindquist, K. A., Barrett, L. F., Bliss-Moreau, E., & Russell, J. A. (2006). Language and the perception of emotion. Emotion, 6(1): 125-138.

Nietzsche, F. (2007). On the Geneaology of Morality. (K. Ansell-Pearson, Ed., & C. Diethe, Trans.) New York: Cambridge University Press.

Sauter, D. A., LeGuen, O., & Haun, D. B. (2011). Categorical Perception of Emotional Facial Expressions Does Not Require Lexical Categories. Emotion, 6(1): 1479-1483.

Solms, M. (2021). The HIdden Spring: A Journey to the Source of Consciousness. London: Profile Books.

Spiegel, A. (2017, June 1). Invisibilia: A Man Finds An Explosive Emotion Locked In A Word. Retrieved from NPR: https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2017/06/01/529876861/an-anthropologist-discovers-the-terrible-emotion-locked-in-a-word

Whorf, B. L. (1940). Science and Linguistics. Technol. Rev., 247-248.