The universality of the semantic structure of emotion terms: methods for the study of inter- and intra-cultural variability

The issue of cultural universals versus linguistic relativity is currently one of the most intensely debated topics in sociocultural anthropology. Emotion terms have long served as a contested area and we provide a brief review. The primary aim of the paper is to introduce methods that facilitate the objective analysis of empirical findings on the extent to which semantic structure is shared among different languages. The main finding of this paper is that Chinese-, English-, and Japanesespeaking subjects assign basically similar meanings to 15 common emotion terms. The differences among the three languages are genuine and statistically significant but small. One of the particularly impressive aspects of the present findings is the extent to which they are consistent with previous research traditions that posit cultural and semantic universals. Differences also exist in the performance of Chinese and Japanese bilingual subjects when performing tasks in English compared to performing the same tasks in their native language, [emotions, inter-cultural and intra-cultural variability, cultural universals, linguistic relativity, Chinese, Japanese]

[1]  A. Dietze.  Types of Emotions or Dimensions of Emotion? A Comparison of Typal Analysis with Factor Analysis , 1963 .

[2]  R. Levy.  Introduction: Self and Emotion , 1983 .

[3]  B. Mesquita,et al.  Cultural variations in emotions: a review. , 1992, Psychological bulletin.

[4]  J. E. Jackson.  A User's Guide to Principal Components , 1991 .

[5]  Timothy J. Brazill,et al.  Culture as shared cognitive representations. , 1996, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America.

[6]  P. Ekman.  Are there basic emotions? , 1992, Psychological review.

[7]  J. Russell.  Pancultural Aspects of the Human Conceptual Organization of Emotions , 1983 .

[8]  J. Russell.  A circumplex model of affect. , 1980 .

[9]  A. Kimball Romney,et al.  Systematic Data Collection , 1988 .

[10]  S. Nerlove,et al.  Balanced designs for triads tests: Two examples from English , 1976 .

[11]  Anna Wierzbicka,et al.  Talking about emotions : semantics, culture, and cognition , 1992 .

[12]  C. R. Rao,et al.  Statistical analysis of shape of objects based on landmark data. , 1996, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America.

[13]  S. Weller.  Shared Knowledge, Intracultural Variation, and Knowledge Aggregation , 1987 .

[14]  J. Boster.  Agreement Between Biological Classification Systems Is Not Dependent On Cultural Transmission , 1987 .

[15]  Catherine A. Lutz.  the domain of emotion words on Ifaluk , 1982 .

[16]  M. Sahlins.  That's Not What I Said: A Reply to Derek Freeman , 1964 .

[17]  Edward E. Smith,et al.  The Tree of Life: Universal and Cultural Features of Folkbiological Taxonomies and Inductions , 1997, Cognitive Psychology.

[18]  K. Scherer,et al.  Culture and emotion. , 1997 .

[19]  J. H. O'Neill,et al.  The Correspondence of Jivaroan to Scientific Ornithology , 1986 .

[20]  W. Batchelder,et al.  Test theory without an answer key , 1988 .

[21]  J. Searle.  The Construction of Social Reality , 1997 .

[22]  W. Batchelder,et al.  Culture as Consensus: A Theory of Culture and Informant Accuracy , 1986 .

[23]  Cognition and affect in the appraisal of events , 1986 .

[24]  P. Ekman.  An argument for basic emotions , 1992 .

[25]  D. Medin,et al.  Categorization and Reasoning among Tree Experts: Do All Roads Lead to Rome? , 1997, Cognitive Psychology.

[26]  C. Osgood,et al.  The Measurement of Meaning , 1958 .

[27]  T. Lebra.  Shame and Guilt: A Psycho cultural View of the Japanese Self1 , 1983 .

[28]  N. Mantel.  The detection of disease clustering and a generalized regression approach. , 1967, Cancer research.

[29]  C. Spearman.  General intelligence Objectively Determined and Measured , 1904 .

[30]  Douglas J. Herrmann,et al.  Similarities and Differences in Meaning in Six Cultures , 1981 .

[31]  D. F. Morrison,et al.  Multivariate Statistical Methods , 1968 .

[32]  Murray S. Miron,et al.  Cross-Cultural Universals of Affective Meaning , 1975 .

[33]  W. Batchelder,et al.  Recent Applications of Cultural Consensus Theory , 1987 .

[34]  F. Bookstein,et al.  Morphometric Tools for Landmark Data: Geometry and Biology , 1999 .

[35]  J. Russell,et al.  Comparing Emotion Words between Languages , 1995 .

[36]  F L Bookstein,et al.  Biometrics, biomathematics and the morphometric synthesis. , 1996, Bulletin of mathematical biology.

[37]  A. Romney,et al.  Metric Scaling: Correspondence Analysis , 1990 .

[38]  P. Ekman,et al.  Unmasking the face : a guide to recognizing emotions from facial clues , 1975 .

[39]  L. Cosmides,et al.  The Adapted mind : evolutionary psychology and the generation of culture , 1992 .

[40]  J. Boster.  Natural sources of internal category structure: Typicality, familiarity, and similarity of birds , 1988, Memory & cognition.

[41]  Andrea Lutz,et al.  The Anthropology of Emotions , 1986 .

[42]  J. Chang,et al.  Analysis of individual differences in multidimensional scaling via an n-way generalization of “Eckart-Young” decomposition , 1970 .

[43]  D. E. Breedlove,et al.  Folk Taxonomies and Biological Classification , 1966, Science.

[44]  J. Russell.  Culture and the categorization of emotions. , 1991, Psychological bulletin.

[45]  W. Batchelder,et al.  Predicting Clustering From Semantic Structure , 1993 .

[46]  A K Romney,et al.  Cultural universals: measuring the semantic structure of emotion terms in English and Japanese. , 1997, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America.

[47]  A. Kimball Romney,et al.  Correspondence Analysis as a Multidimensional Scaling Technique for Nonfrequency Similarity Matrices , 1998 .

[48]  Stephen C. Levinson,et al.  Rethinking Linguistic Relativity , 1991, Current Anthropology.

[49]  Amnon Rapoport,et al.  Structures in the subjective lexicon , 1971 .

[50]  Paul Kay,et al.  Science ≠ imperialism: There are nontrivial constraints on color naming , 1997, Behavioral and Brain Sciences.

[51]  Paul Ekman,et al.  Facial Expressions of Emotion: New Findings, New Questions , 1992 .

[52]  A. Romney,et al.  Toward a Theory of Culture as Shared Cognitive Structures , 1998 .

[53]  L. Hubert.  Assignment methods in combinatorial data analysis , 1986 .

[54]  D. G. Haring.  EARL HOYT BELL 1903–1963 , 1964 .

[55]  Michael T. Ghiselin,et al.  Darwin and Facial Expression: A Century of Research in Review.@@@Darwin on Man: A Psychological Study of Scientific Creativity. , 1974 .

[56]  W. Batchelder,et al.  Systematic Biases in Social Perception , 1994, American Journal of Sociology.

[57]  Anthony F. C. Wallace,et al.  Sharing and Diversity in Emotion terminology , 1973 .

[58]  E. Hammel.  Cognitive Order in Genealogical Lists , 1984, Journal of Anthropological Research.

[59]  B. Saunders,et al.  Colour: An exosomatic organ? , 1997, Behavioral and Brain Sciences.

[60]  S. Levinson,et al.  Rethinking Linguistic Relativity , 1991, Current Anthropology.

[61]  J. Russell,et al.  Fuzzy concepts in a fuzzy hierarchy: varieties of anger. , 1994, Journal of personality and social psychology.