Autoethnography helps analyse emotions

Emotions are a near-universal component of human experience, with powerful influences on human attitudes and behaviors, and large-scale social, economic, and environmental consequences (Zajonc, 1984; Oatley et al., 2006; Turner and Stets, 2006; Nesse and Ellsworth, 2009; Niedenthal and Brauer, 2012; Dehaene, 2014). They have been described as a continuum that includes over 100 named emotions, with some individual and cultural differences (Johnson-Laird and Oatley, 1989; Nesse and Ellsworth, 2009; Izard, 2010). These are sometimes treated as combinations of basic emotions (Ortony and Turner, 1990), recognizable through facial expressions (Ekman, 1982; Dannlowski et al., 2007; Graham and LaBar, 2012). The neurophysiological and biochemical mechanisms and effects of human emotions have been analyzed intensively (LeDoux, 2000; Ackerl et al., 2002; Chen et al., 2006; Mujica-Parodi et al., 2009; Zhou and Chen, 2009; Haegler et al., 2010; Van Westerloo et al., 2011; Agren et al., 2012; Gross and Canteras, 2012; Avila and Lin, 2014; Dehaene, 2014). All such measures, however, rely on research subjects also communicating their self-perceived emotions to the researcher. Similarly, for analyses of psychological experiences rather than biochemical or neurological mechanisms, research subjects must express their emotional experiences in words and communicate them to researchers. The latter also use language to communicate their analyses to research readers. They may include selected quotations directly from the research subjects. Comprehension of such communications about emotions depends on mutual recognition of similar emotional experiences. This approach breaks down, however, for emotions that are not widely experienced, and which are considered to be indescribable by those who have indeed experienced them. The popular literatures of ecstatic religions, active military combat, and extreme outdoor sports all argue that there are feelings that are only comprehensible to individuals who have experienced them in person (Caputo, 1977; Allman et al., 2009; Buckley, 2012; Yogis, 2013). These experiences include the perception of slowed time (Arstila, 2012; Wittmann, 2013; Buckley, 2014). Human societies thus include a small number of individuals who have experienced emotions of a type or intensity that fall outside the distributional range for the remainder of the population. These differences are recognized by the rest of society, which may label those individuals as eccentric, sick or crazy, with either positive or negative connotations. For at least some individuals, these emotional experiences drive them to take actions that are considered unusual or extreme, also in either a negative or positive way. There are extensive literatures on the psychologies of crime, combat, mental illness, spirituality and extreme sport, reflecting the importance of these emotions and actions to human societies (Lyng, 1990; Buckley, 2012). These literatures include ethnographic analyses, where the researcher aims to become assimilated into the group under study. Even with full-immersion ethnography, however (Hammersley and Atkinson, 2007; Dauphinee, 2010), verbal communication between research subject and research analyst remains critical. The insider approach aims partly to provide a shared basis for understanding, but principally to establish trust between subjects and researcher, so that the research subjects will tell the researcher information that they do not share with outsiders. Even insider ethnographies, therefore, cannot be used to analyse experiences which research subjects cannot put into words. If a research subject cannot communicate their emotional experiences to a researcher, there is no opportunity for analysis unless the researcher can directly experience those same emotions themselves. For emotional experiences of this type, therefore, the only research approach currently available is analytical autoethnography, the systematic study of a researcher’s own experience (Buzard, 2003; Anderson, 2006; Dauphinee, 2010; Tolich, 2010). Researchers who have themselves undergone such experiences have an opportunity to describe, analyse and report them by using themselves as research subjects. Extreme emotional experiences are infrequent, and most are involuntary (Berntsen, 2009), so data are sparse. In the particular case of extreme sports or adventure activities, however, a researcher who is also a practitioner can adopt an experimental approach to autoethnography. That is, they can deliberately repeat an experience which creates powerful emotions, specifically to study those emotions. Analytical autoethnography may thus be seen simply as an extension or special case of conventional ethnography. In any ethnographic study, there is a tradeoff between breadth and depth, the number of research subjects against the detail they reveal. Analytical autoethnography is the logical continuation, narrowest but deepest. Researchers can examine their own emotions in finer detail than those