Somatic Referencing and Psychologisation in Emotion Narratives: A USA–Ghana Comparison

Ameka (2002), Dzokoto and Okazaki (2006) and Guerts (2002) have observed a preponderance of somatic references in the communication of emotion in several spoken Ghanaian languages. This suggests that embodiment features prominently in Ghanaian cultural scripts of emotions. Unfortunately, the structure of English—Ghana’s official language due to its British colonial history—does not provide opportunities for somatic referencing in its emotion lexicon. How, then, do English-speaking Ghanaians express emotions, given the discrepancy between the cultural scripts and the structural limitations of the English emotion lexicon? To answer this question, 186 Ghanaian and181 American college students recalled what they considered one of their top ten most significant positive or negative emotional events, and indicated recalled physiological changes on a blank diagram of the human body. A subgroup of the larger sample provided written narratives about their most significant emotional event. Using thematic investigations and Linguistic Inquiry Word Count software, data analysis explored the nature of discourse about emotions in English, with particular focus on affective and embodied referents in the emotion narratives. Ghanaians reported fewer emotion words, but not more somatic words. The implications of the findings for somatisation are discussed.