A1 Vertaisarvioitu alkuperäisartikkeli tieteellisessä lehdessä

Embodied emotions in ancient Neo-Assyrian texts revealed by bodily mapping of emotional semantics




TekijätLahnakoski, Juha M.; Bennett, Ellie; Nummenmaa, Lauri; Steinert, Ulrike; Sams, Mikko; Svärd, Saana

KustantajaElsevier BV

Julkaisuvuosi2024

JournaliScience

Tietokannassa oleva lehden nimiiScience

Artikkelin numero111365

Vuosikerta27

Aloitussivu111365

ISSN2589-0042

DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1016/j.isci.2024.111365

Verkko-osoitehttps://doi.org/10.1016/j.isci.2024.111365

Rinnakkaistallenteen osoitehttps://research.utu.fi/converis/portal/detail/Publication/484229724


Tiivistelmä

Emotions are associated with subjective emotion-specific bodily sensations. Here, we utilized this relationship and computational linguistic methods to map a representation of emotions in ancient texts. We analyzed Neo-Assyrian texts from 934–612 BCE to discern consistent relationships between linguistic expressions related to both emotions and bodily sensations. We then computed statistical regularities between emotion terms and words referring to body parts and back-projected the resulting emotion-body part relationships on a body template, yielding bodily sensation maps for the emotions. We found consistent embodied patterns for 18 distinct emotions. Hierarchical clustering revealed four main clusters of bodily emotion categories, two clusters of mainly positive emotions, one large cluster of mainly negative emotions, and one of empathy and schadenfreude. These results reveal the historical use of embodied language pertaining to human emotions. Our data-driven tool could enable future comparisons of textual embodiment patterns across different languages and cultures across time.


Ladattava julkaisu

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Julkaisussa olevat rahoitustiedot
This research was conducted as part of the project Embodied Emotions: Ancient Mesopotamia and Today, funded by the Finnish Cultural Foundation (project no. 00220992). We thank Heidi Jauhiainen for providing example files to test the scripts used to produce the word embeddings. The PMI-embeddings script was developed with the assistance of the Center of Excellence Ancient Near Eastern Empires, funded by the Research Council of Finland (decision number 352747). The emotion vocabulary is based on the work of the project “Akkadian and Hittite Emotions in Context” (AHEC, funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation, project no. 495257771).


Last updated on 2025-15-08 at 15:41