Map of the World's Emotional Temperature | Hacker News Reader

Map of the World's Emotional Temperature

news.gallup.com

39 pointsmdp202132 comments

The way people respond these questions is highly dependent of cultural norms.

There are quite violent countries here where people report very low emotional stress.

Seeing that the Japanese get almost to the bottom on question "Were you treated with respect all day Yesterday?"...

I suspect that the meaning of the word "respect" may be very different amongst all of those cultures, which puts the meaning of this survey somewhere murky between economics, sociology, and linguistics...

The survey is exactly sociological. This involves perception: "how do you evaluate your day of yesterday = what is the typical perception of the day of yesterday per population".

Which can be very telling. Of course the data is to be interpreted.

To what degree is referring to Taiwan as "province of China," (I've heard it referred to as Republic of China/ROC) pandering to the PRC/CCP? That being said, TIL that referring to it in this way is in line with the ISO

https://www.iso.org/obp/ui/#iso:code:3166:TW

It is a matter of legal status. (And by the way, mainland administrations themselves seemingly had no issue in saying that the situation is "complicated". Nobody is fooling anyone.)

I had my comment about this flagged. Commenting that it's a bit unusual to show Taiwan as a province, and yet showing it's stat seperately like one does for all the other countries on the list, and not breaking down provincial stats for any other countries, strikes me as unusual, got me slammed by the moderators here. If this is the state of play on HN, I will refrain from all participation here, deapite having had an account for dozen years and having applied several times to Y-combinator etc. This makes me VERY negative about HN, because I've posted much more edgy comments in the past, and this one is quite a fair point - pointing out the logical inconstency in how they slice the data because of political reasons.

It is one of the most surprising maps I have ever seen: there seem to be peoples who state only very rarely experiencing anger or sadness...

(The measures are: anger, sadness, stress, worry, physical pain; enjoyment, rest, learning, laughter, being respected.)

Can this public confirm through experience what the study states about Vietnam, Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Mexico, Estonia...?

I don't have experience in any of those countries, but I have watched a lot of B-flicks in the US, and there's a trope where the hero is sad in the 2nd act because the villain just killed their best friend (usually directly after the enjoyment scene — middle of the W), and they still don't prevail in the 3rd act, until (at the bottom right of the W) they get angry and win, for the happily ever after (top right of the W) Hollywood Ending.

I could easily believe cultures with a different movie tradition might well have less positive (heroic?) views on anger and sadness.

It’s deeper than that. You will need to investigate the heroes journey a bit alongside film semiotics to refine this intuitive view.

People often emerge from apathy with sadness. Sadness to anger. Hollywood dramatizes the heroes journey as have most epics prior.

The opposite of Epic is understated. Understanding life is complex (as are films). Viewing both through a semiotic lens helps us not to reduce things to less than their entirety.

Films are much less complex than life but watching many of them may help tune complex pattern recognition.

The question is "Did you experience the following feelings during a lot of the day Yesterday? How about anger?" So it represents a pretty bad day. In my life, I think this would be true for less than 1% of days.

T., you are clearly pretty much accomplished... What about the median in your area (not your environment)? What about different personalities in challenging environments? For other people a day of remarkable anger is "every day" (with some days more merciful than others).

That a society has better stats than Afghanistan is understandable; better than, say, Switzerland, is quite interesting.

With experience in some of these countries*, I would say you want to investigate the healthy interplay between local shamanic traditions with imported technological culture ;)

(Assuming tlb is “wealthy” enough not to need to know people who schedule shaman appointments as a backup-plan in the 1% situations)

*shamans incorporate error correction into their practice here!

[also see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41309270]

Japan's top ranking for 'experienced disrespect' is somewhat amusing, i'd be interested to hear anecdotes.

I can see how this would make sense, though. If the culture is sensitive to the concept of respect, perhaps it's more likely to perceive what it sees as disrespectful occurrences.

Related tangent: I, no joke, dreamt last night I was at an omakase in Tokyo and told the chef "Kuidaore/食い倒れ" (Osaka kinda colloquialism for ~"Eat yourself into bankruptcy"...kind of like cheers), which offended them for whatever reason, because we weren't in Osaka (which is totally preposterous, to be clear)

Wow. Vietnam is in the top 5 for most positive emotions and bottom 5 for most negative ones.

I had the same feeling. Some of the results also made me wonder whether the reported feelings are actual feelings or lies. Which in turn made me wonder whether the view I have about certain countries is close to reality or not. Because in the end for most countries I've never been there nor actively looked up a lot of information about them, meaning all I think I know about it stems from media. Now, the sources I check are probably pretty objective (though as usual leaning towards only reporting the bad news and never the good news), but still, likely not sufficient to paint a complete picture of a certain country/culture.

My impression of Vietnam is that people there are pretty chill indeed, but also that answering truthfully in such surveys might not be in your best interest if you are a local.

They're authoritarian, but not that kind of authoritarians. I feel like they have an easier time criticizing their government than Cubans,but they do it less (Cubans will imply worry/dissatisfaction rather than say it, Vietnamese will say it plainly). It's a bit like China pre-Covid (I never went post-covid, maybe it hasn't changed), Vietnamese overall like/trust their government so they'll avoid talking shit about it, but without the weird nationalist 'pride'/defensiveness/victimhood that I found in China.

[edit] I compared it to Cuba/China because all three of them are communist countries, and I visited them all, but probably comparing Vietnam to its southern neighbors could be more appropriate

Not surprised at all. Vietnamese people have the best outlook and approach to life I've ever seen.

> the best outlook and approach to life I've ever seen

Why don't you tell us more. Details, anecdotes...

I need to know where the cave is that holds these Platonic emotions.

I keep reading about EQ, and feeling the "right" emotions, and "mental health." Unfortunately, I feel what I feel when I feel it even when I get told what I'm feeling is "in appropriate" and even "wrong". Some of it is because that's just the way the neurotransmitters hit my hypothalmus, some of it is because of the accumulation of experience over some half-dozen decades of acculturation and social interaction. I have yet to find some source for what the "right" or even "expected" way to feel is.

This survey also lacks any kind of reference: the meaning of "respect" for a man in super-machismo El Salvador is going to be completely different from a woman in Buddhist Viet Nam.

With zero reference or baseline a study like this is just meaningless drivel. Something to be slotted in a magazine between a quiz on "what breed of dog are you?" and advertisements for expensive product to address your personal inadequacies of some unreachable and ill-defined state of visual aesthetic supremacy.

> This survey also lacks any kind of reference: the meaning of "respect" for a man in super-machismo El Salvador is going to be completely different from a woman in Buddhist Viet Nam.

But it doesn't matter / that is entirely appropriate, because it's about emotion, i.e. how they feel (which is partly a function of culture etc. yes) not some sort of objective 'how sad should you be according to the standard' metric.

OK, but does that matter? And what breed of dog are they? Perhaps there's correlation.

Yes, whether a society contains high or low amounts of desirable or undesirable phenomena, and what could possibly determine that, is of very high importance.

These disparate, completely subjective things are not phenomena.

Oh, they do not appear? At the bottom of the scales is Afghanistan, guess whether there may be objective reasons for the aggregate scalars (and whether their referent could be palpable - phenomenic).

But emotions are 'completely subjective things' so it's not that you want them to normalise to SI emotional units, but rather that you don't want this survey to be done at all?

The treatment that makes people feel respected varies between cultures and genders, but the emotion is the same.

In general, it's useful to disentangle your emotions from what you think is causing them. For example "I feel criticized" doesn't name an emotion. It names one cause, but emotions are far from monocausal. Being able to articulate what actual emotions you experience is helpful in managing them.

> the cave... that holds

Archetypes are outside the cave - inside the mythical cave you find their instances. So: those who want to contemplate emotions go outside.

> what the "right"... is

Constructive.

> reference

No need. Do not assume the purpose. First we measure what is available. That is already interesting. In fact,

> drivel

You made for yourself wrong expectation about what the article should measure - as others have noted. That one population displays definite reactions is definitely interesting - for both theoretical and practical reasons (living in some or some other population is critical).

> your personal

Some people are more interested in other's. You know, they impact you.

South America doing pretty well for all, Israel doing poorly in most

> South America doing pretty well for all

Paraguay seems to be the leader within South America.

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