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Ancient Mesopotamian Emotion Map Challenges Modern Understandings
A study analyzing one million words of ancient Mesopotamian texts (934-612 BC) reveals unique emotion localization, with happiness and love in the liver, anger in the thighs and feet, and suffering in the armpits, challenging modern understandings of emotional experience.
- Where did ancient Mesopotamians locate emotions in the body, and how does this differ from modern understandings?
- A new study analyzing one million words from ancient Mesopotamian texts (934-612 BC) reveals that emotions were localized differently than in modern understanding. For example, happiness and love were associated with the liver, while anger was felt in the thighs and feet, and suffering in the armpits. This challenges the common perception of emotion localization.
- What limitations exist in the study's methodology, and how might these limitations affect the interpretation of its findings?
- The study, published in iScience, quantitatively links emotions to body parts in ancient Near Eastern texts for the first time. The findings highlight the cultural and historical relativity of emotional experience, challenging assumptions about universality. Researchers analyzed diverse texts, including legal, religious, and literary sources.
- What are the broader implications of this research for our understanding of the cultural construction and evolution of emotional experience?
- Future research will compare Mesopotamian findings with 20th-century English and Finnish texts to trace the evolution of emotional experience across cultures and time. The study's limitations, including literacy bias and the lack of female anatomical representation, necessitate cautious interpretation of results and further investigation. This research significantly impacts our understanding of the cultural construction of emotion.
Cognitive Concepts
Framing Bias
The framing is largely neutral, presenting the study's findings without overt bias. The surprising nature of the findings is highlighted, but this is done to engage the reader rather than to push a particular viewpoint.
Language Bias
The language used is generally neutral and descriptive. Words like "fascinating," "surprising," and "peculiar" are used to describe the findings, but these are subjective terms that don't inherently skew the presentation of the research. There is no use of loaded language or charged terminology.
Bias by Omission
The study's limitations are acknowledged, including the low literacy rate in Mesopotamia and the potential bias of cuneiform texts primarily produced by scribes serving the wealthy. The exclusion of female anatomy in the model is also noted as a potential source of bias, potentially omitting a lexicon of emotional terms. However, the article doesn't explore the potential bias stemming from the limited range of texts analyzed (tax lists, sales documents, prayers, early historical and mathematical texts). It's unclear how representative these are of the full spectrum of Mesopotamian emotional expression. This omission could limit the study's generalizability and impact conclusions.
Gender Bias
The study's limitations section explicitly mentions that the model used excluded female anatomy, which is a significant gender bias. This suggests a potential underrepresentation of female emotional experiences and vocabulary. The article highlights this limitation, but further analysis of the potential impact of this exclusion on the results would strengthen the analysis.