Different ways of Feeling: Exploring Culture and Emotion from a West-African Lens

Emotions are a defining component of the human experience: they contribute to our survival, guide our behavior, and aid us in forming relationships. Anthropological and Cultural Psychological perspectives view emotions as being culturally constructed scripts. This presentation will review a program of emotion research conducted in selected West African contexts,  using emotion data obtained using a variety of qualitative and quantitative research approaches. Presented findings will highlight cultural scripting of emotion labels and emotion discourse; examine novel avenues to understand emotion in social context; and explore cultural variations in emotion-related attentional processes.  The findings will illustrate how psychological data from under-researched populations can inform and advance the study of human behavior.