The Countries Where People Are the Most Emotionally Complex

The Atlantic:

Think of the last piece of big news you got. How did you feel about it? Happy? Sad? Angry? Worried? Excited? Grateful? A little bit of all of the above? Experiencing multiple emotions at once may make it seem like you don’t actually know just how you feel about something—that you’re ambivalent, or indecisive, or wishy-washy. Psychologists would say it just means you’re emotionally complex. And according to a new study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, emotional complexity varies a lot between countries.

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In the study, Igor Grossmann and Alex Huynh of the University of Waterloo and Phoebe Ellsworth of the University of Michigan explored how emotional complexity manifests in different cultures. In a random sampling of 1.3 million English web pages from 10 different countries, they tracked how many times a positive-emotion word appeared within two words of a negative-emotion word. Sites from Malaysia, the Philippines, and Singapore all had significantly higher rates of mixed emotions than the texts from six other countries—the United States, Canada, Australia, the United Kingdom, Ireland, and New Zealand.  South Africa came in somewhere in the middle of these groups.

Read the whole story: The Atlantic