The emotion paradox
Why negative emotions hurt less in the East
Several years ago, a team of researchers puzzled over a paradox found in cross-cultural data on mental health. They called it the “East-West divide”. The paradox is that East Asians tend to report more negative emotions than European Americans and yet research suggests they have much lower levels of anxiety and depression.
Some argue that the paradox is not real, that it stems from flawed methods or non-disclosure due to high stigma in the East. Yet increasing evidence from other studies shows that while negative feelings correlate with worse mental and physical health in the West, the link is significantly weaker in the East. And the key difference, it seems, lies in how emotions are understood and engaged in the two cultures.
In Eastern dialectical traditions, negative and positive feelings are not mutually exclusive, but co-occur and co-exist as part of a natural cycle that keeps the good and the bad in balance. The Western world, by contrast, sees negative emotions as a sign of personal failure — the failure to deal with the normal ups and downs of life, or to keep our inner impulses in check.
As a result, our feelings become a threat to the self, triggering a stress response that, over time, can severely compromise our health.
Studies have found, for instance, that negative emotions are associated with increased inflammation and elevated cortisol levels but only among US subjects and not Japanese participants. Another study showed that aversive feelings predicted worse health outcomes in both nations, but in the US they led to more chronic conditions, as well as greater decreases in wellbeing and self-esteem, than in Japan.
Accept or avoid: a world of difference
One likely explanation for these results comes down to the acceptance vs. avoidance of difficult emotions. Because negative feelings are seen as less threatening in the East, they are more easily tolerated, whereas in the West, we go to great lengths to avoid them.
The irony here — the big cosmic joke — is that the more we avoid our feelings, the more intensely we feel them.
My co-founder Hazel, a therapist and author, argues in her book that by resisting our mind monsters, we end up feeding them. Hidden from sight, they become distorted by our imaginations, growing scarier and more threatening in the shadows of our psyches.
Of course, this makes us even more eager to avoid them, to banish them to some dark corner of the mind forever, where they become even more monstrous. And so it goes — a vicious cycle that eventually leaves us feeling out of control.
The skill of putting feelings into words
The antidote is to invite our emotions out of their dungeons and bring them into the light. Research over the past decade has found that people high in emotion differentiation — the ability to identify what you are feeling with specificity — exhibit better mental health, emotion regulation and coping skills. Studies have shown that good emotion differentiators report 40% less drinking under stress and they are up to 50% more likely to keep their cool when provoked. By contrast, low emotion differentiation has been linked to social anxiety, major depression, eating disorders, and borderline personality disorder.
So what exactly is emotion differentiation and what makes it so potent? It simply means that when you feel something, you know exactly what it is. You know, for instance, when you feel “hurt” and that it’s different from when you feel “angry” or “frustrated” or “disappointed”. You are able to make distinctions between your emotions instead of lumping them into one category such as “I feel bad.”
Putting feelings into words gives you key information about what to do with them. It allows you to regulate and manage your negative emotions appropriately rather than try to fight, numb or escape them in a way that backfires or that you come to regret later.
A case study: emotion labels and storytelling
When my partner Hazel and I started working on Betwixt: The Story of You, we knew that helping people to develop emotional awareness would be key. We also knew that it wouldn’t be easy. Some of us have never been taught to pay attention to how we feel, much less to describe our emotional lives or decode their underlying messages.
Like any skill, emotional awareness takes practice and to practice something regularly, it can’t be too difficult, unpleasant or overwhelming. During the R&D phase of the app, two techniques proved to work particularly well for our users: affect labeling and storytelling.
Affect labelling is the act of naming your emotional state. You can write it, speak it or even just select from a list of options. It doesn’t feel like an effort, yet studies have found that it works similarly to more typical emotion regulation strategies.
But what made the biggest difference during our user testing was when we wrapped affect labeling into a story.
So now, you come to take a journey through a fantastical, dreamlike world called the In-Between and in the process you get to reflect on your thoughts and to clarify your emotions without feeling like you are engaging in therapeutic practice. This provides an opportunity to approach personal issues from the side rather than head-on, and try to make sense of them in a way that’s creative, playful and enjoyable.
We have a number of theories as to why story works so well. It seems that imagery and metaphor offer an additional, more visceral path to process emotions than words alone. Moreover, engaging the imagination loosens up rigid patterns of thought, allowing new connections to form and new meaning to emerge. Then, emotions can be made coherent and integrated into a more adaptive narrative — one in which our mind monsters no longer lurk in the shadows waiting to get us. Instead, they come back home.
And so, by honing our language around emotion, we can come to learn what Eastern culture has known since the dawn of civilization — that all of our feelings are allowed to co-exist peacefully, each one having its place in the ongoing stories that are our lives.
Elitsa Dermendzhiyska is a science writer and co-creator of Betwixt: The Story of You — an immersive journaling app that teaches you to self-reflect.
