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Affective abstraction refers to how people conceptualize affective states in terms of category-level re- presentations that generalize across speci!c situations (e.g., “fear” as evoked by heights, predators, and haunted houses). Here, we develop a novel task for assessing affective abstraction and test its relations with trait alexithymia, depression, and autism spectrum quotient. In a preregistered online study, participants completed a set of tasks in which they matched a cue image with one of two probe images based on similarity of affective experience. In a discrete emotion version of the task, the cue and target probe matched on a discrete emotion category while controlling for valence. In a valence version of the task, the cue and target probe matched on valence (i.e., pleasantness or unpleasantness). We further varied the degree of abstraction such that some judgments crossed semantic categories (e.g., a house cue with animal probes). Accuracy, as indexed by the proportion of choices that accorded with norms, predicted trait measures of alexithymia, depression, and autism quotient with medium effect sizes. We conducted an integrative data analysis by including data from three other (nonpreregistered) samples (N = 435) and found substantial moderation by sampling population (Amazon Mechanical Turk, college students) and partial moderation by gender identity. Additional constraints on generalization include that our sample included predominantly White American adults between the ages of 23 and 64. These results provide preliminary support for the notion that affective abstraction may re"ect a transdiagnostic psychological process of broad relevance to individual differences in affective processing. 

Emotions are often thought of as internal mental states centering on individuals’ subjective feelings and evaluations. This understanding is consistent with studies of emotion narratives, or the descriptions people give for experienced events that they regard as emotions. Yet these studies, and contemporary psychology more generally, often rely on observations of educated Europeans and European Americans, constraining psychological theory and methods. In this article, we present observations from an inductive, qualitative analysis of interviews conducted with the Hadza, a community of small-scale hunter-gatherers in Tanzania, and juxtapose them with a set of interviews conducted with Americans from North Carolina. Although North Carolina event descriptions largely conformed to the assumptions of eurocentric psychological theory, Hadza descriptions foregrounded action and bodily sensations, the physical environment, immediate needs, and the experiences of social others. These observations suggest that subjective feelings and internal mental states may not be the organizing principle of emotion the world around. Qualitative analysis of emotion narratives from outside of a U.S. (and western) cultural context has the potential to uncover additional diversity in meaning-making, offering a descriptive foundation on which to build a more robust and inclusive science of emotion.