Comparing US and Belgian cultural models of emotion via descriptions of everyday experience

To examine whether American and Belgian cultural models of emotion – and the values and practices that inform them – can be recovered from natural language, we analyze semi-structured interviews in which participants in each sample described recent emotional events. Our analysis has three stages: 1) characterizing the contents of each cultural group’s descriptions using topic modeling; 2) counting the use of various function (e.g., personal pronouns) and content (e.g., emotion- vs. cognition-related language) word categories; 3) performing an inductive analysis of the occurrent themes.