Emotions Across Languages And Cultures

Introduction Part I. Feelings, Languages and Cultures: 1. Emotions or feelings? 2. Breaking the 'hermeneutical circle' 3. 'Experience-near' and 'experience-distant' concepts 4. Describing feelings through prototypes 5. 'Emotions': disruptive episodes or vital forces that mould our lives? 6. Why words matter 7. Emotion and culture 8. The Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) as a tool for cross-cultural analysis 9. An illustration: 'sadness' in English and in Russian 10. The scope of this book Part II. Defining Emotion Concepts: Discovering 'Cognitive Scenarios': 1. 'Something good happened' and related concepts 2. 'Something bad happened' and related concepts 3. 'Bad things can happen' and related concepts 4. 'I don't want things like this to happen' and related concepts 5. Thinking about 'someone else' 6. Thinking about ourselves 7. Concluding remarks Part III. A Case Study of Emotion in Culture: German 'Angst': 1. Angst as a peculiarly German concept 2. Heidegger's analysis of angst 3. Angst in the language of psychology 4. Angst in everyday language 5. Defining angst 6. The German angst in a comparative perspective 7. Luther's influence on the German language 8. Eschatological anxieties of Luther's times 9. The meaning of angst in Luther's writings 10. Martin Luther's inner life and its possible impact on the history of angst 11. Luther's possible role in the shift from angst 'affliction' to angst 'anxiety/fear' 12. The great social and economic anxieties of Luther's times 13. Uncertainty vs certainty, angst vs sicherheit 14. Certainty and ordnung 15. Conclusion Part IV. Reading Human Faces: 1. The human face: a 'mirror' or a 'tool' 2. From the 'psychology of facial expression' to the 'semantics of facial expression' 3. 'Social' does not mean 'voluntary' 4. What kind of 'messages' can a face transmit? 5. Messages are not 'dimensions' 6. 'The face alone' or 'the face in context'? 7. Analyzing facial behaviour into meaningful components 8. Summing up the assumptions 9. In what terms should facial behaviour be described? 10. Humans and primates: a unified framework for verbal, non-verbal, and preverbal communication 11. The meaning of eyebrows drawn together 12. The meaning of 'raised eyebrows' 13. The meaning of the 'wide open eyes' (with immobile eyebrows) 14. The meaning of a turned down mouth 15. The meaning of tightly pressed lips 16. Conclusion: the what, the how, and the why in reading human faces Part V. Russian Emotional Expression: 1. Introduction 2. Emotion and the body 3. Conclusion Part VI. Comparing Emotional Norms across Languages and Cultures: Polish vs Anglo-American: 1. Emotion and culture 2. The scripts of 'sincerity' 3. The scripts of interpersonal 'warmth' 4. The scripts of 'spontaneity' 5. Conclusion Part VII. Emotional Universals: 1. 'Emotional universals' - genuine and spurious 2. A proposed set of 'emotional universals' 3. Conclusion Further reading Index.