Emotions Across Languages and Cultures: Diversity and ...

1 Emotions AcrossLanguages and Cultures: Diversity and UniversalsAnna WierzbickaEditions de la Maison des Sciences de l HommeParispublished by the press syndicate of the university of cambridgeThe Pitt Building, Trumpington Street, Cambridge United KingdomEditions de la Maison des Sciences de l Homme54 Boulevard Raspail, 75270 Paris Cedes 06, Francecambridge university pressThe Edinburgh Building, Cambridge, CB2 2RU, UK West 20th Street, New York, NY 10011 4211, USA Stamford Road, Oakleigh, Melbourne 3166, Australia Anna Wierzbicka 1999 This book is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions ofrelevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may takeplace without the written permission of Cambridge University published 1999 Printed in the United Kingdom at the University Press, CambridgeTypeset in Palatino 10/12pt [vn]A catalogue record for this book is available from the British LibraryISBN 0 521 59042 6 hardbackISBN 0 521 59971 7 paperbackContentsList of figurespageviiiAcknowledgmentsixList of abbreviationsxi1 Introduction: feelings, Languages , and cultures11 Emotions or feelings?

2 12 Breaking the hermeneutical circle 73 Experience-near and experience-distant concepts104 Describing feelings through prototypes125 Emotions : disruptive episodes or vital forces thatmould our lives?176 Why words matter247 Emotion and culture318 The Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) as a tool forcross-cultural analysis349 An illustration: sadness in English and in Russian3810 The scope of this book452 Defining emotion concepts: discovering cognitivescenarios 491 Something good happened and related concepts502 Something bad happened and related concepts603 Bad things can happen and related concepts724 I don t want things like this to happen and relatedconcepts875 Thinking about other people976 Thinking about ourselves1087 Concluding remarks121v3 A case study of emotion in culture .

3 GermanAngst1231 Angst as a peculiarly German concept1232 Heidegger s analysis of Angst 1263 Angst in the language of psychology1284 Angstin everyday language1305 DefiningAngst1346 The German Angst in a comparative perspective1377 Luther s influence on the German language1398 Eschatological anxieties of Luther s times1419 The meaning ofAngstin Luther s writings14310 Martin Luther s inner life and its possible impact on thehistory ofAngst14811 Luther s possible role in the shift from Angst affliction toAngst anxiety/fear 15112 The great social and economic anxieties of Luther stimes15813 Uncertainty vs. certainty, Certainty andOrdnung16315 Conclusion1664 Reading human faces1681 The human face: a mirror or a tool ?

4 1682 From the psychology of facial expression to the semantics of facial expression 1723 Social does not mean voluntary 1754 What kind of messages can a face transmit?1775 Messages are not dimensions 1786 The face alone or the face in context ?1807 Analysing facial behaviour into meaningful components1828 Summing up the assumptions1859 In what terms should facial behaviour be described?18610 Humans and primates: a unified framework for verbal,non-verbal, and preverbal communication19111 The meaning of eyebrows drawn together19512 The meaning of raised eyebrows 20113 The meaning of the wide open eyes (with immobileeyebrows)20614 The meaning of a down-turned mouth20815 The meaning of tightly pressed lips211viContents16 Conclusion: the what, the how, and the why in thereading of human faces2135 Russian emotional expression2161 Introduction2162 Emotion and the body2193 Conclusion2346 Comparing emotional norms Across Languages andcultures: Polish vs.

5 Anglo-American2401 Emotion and culture2402 The scripts of sincerity 2413 The scripts of interpersonal warmth 2514 The scripts of spontaneity 2555 Conclusion2717 emotional universals2731 emotional universals genuine and spurious2732 A proposed set of emotional universals 2753 Conclusion305 Notes308 References318 Index338viiContentsFiguresFigure 1: from Cu celoglu, 1970page174 Figure 2: Fig. , from Russell, 1997179 Figure 3: from Russell, 1997199 Figure 4: from Ekman, 1975207 Figure 5: from Darwin, 1955[1872]209 Figure 6: from the I-M Series set of photographs used inearly cross-cultural research by Professor Carroll Izard;first appeared in Izard, 1971214viiiCHAPTER 1 Introduction: feelings, Languages ,and cultures1 Emotions or feelings?

6 According to the biologist Charles Birch (1995: ix), Feelings are whatmatter most in life 1. While it is debatable whether they really matter most , they certainly matter a great deal; and it is good to see that aftera long period of scholarly neglect, feelings are now at the forefront ofinterdisciplinary investigations, spanning the humanities, socialsciences, and biological would say: not feelings , but Emotions and the question which of the two (feelings or Emotions )? plunges us straight into theheart of the central controversy concerning the relationship betweenhuman biology on the one hand and language and culture on the psychologists appear to be more comfortable with the term emotion than feeling because Emotions seem to be somehow objective.

7 It is often assumed that only the objective is real andamenable to rigorous study, and that Emotions have a biologicalfoundation and can therefore be studied objectively , whereas feel-ings cannot be studied at all. (Birch (1995: v) calls this attitude theflight from subjectivity ; see also Gaylin 1979).Seventy years ago the founder of behaviourism John Watson pro-posed the following definition (quoted in Plutchik 1994: 3): An emo-tion is an hereditary pattern-reaction involving profound changes ofthe bodily mechanisms as a whole, but particularly of the visceral andglandular systems . While such purely behaviouristic conceptions of Emotions have now been repudiated, Emotions are still often seenas something that, for example, can be measured.

8 Plutchik (1994: 139)himself writes: Because Emotions are complex states of the organisminvolving feelings, behaviour, impulses, physiological changes andefforts at control, the measurement of Emotions is also a complexprocess .Many anthropologists, too, prefer to talk about Emotions ratherthan feelings in their case not because of the former s objective biological foundation but because of their interpersonal, social basis.(See Lutz 1988; White 1993.)1 But the wordemotionis not as unproblematic as it seems; and bytaking the notion of emotion as our starting point we may be commit-ting ourselves, at the outset, to a perspective which is shaped by ourown native language , or by the language currently predominant insome academic disciplines rather than taking a maximally neutral and culture -independent point of view.

9 (Some will say, no doubt: nothing is neutral, nothing is culture -independent . To avoid gettingbogged down in this particular controversy at the outset, I repeat:maximallyneutral,maximallyculture -independent.)The English wordemotioncombines in its meaning a reference to feeling , a reference to thinking , and a reference to a person s example, one can talk about a feeling of hunger , or a feeling ofheartburn , but not about an emotion of hunger or an emotion ofheartburn , because the feelings in question are not thought-related. Onecan also talk about a feeling of loneliness or a feeling of alienation ,but not an emotion of loneliness or an emotion of alienation ,because while these feelings are clearly related to thoughts (such as I amall alone , I don t belong etc.)

10 , they do not suggest any associatedbodily events or processes (such as rising blood pressure, a rush of bloodto the head, tears, and so on).In the anthropological literature on Emotions , feelings and body are often confused, and the wordfeelingsis sometimes treated asinterchangeable with the expressionbodily feelings. In fact, some writerstry to vindicate the importance of feelings for human Emotions byarguing for the importance of the body. For example, Michelle Rosaldo(1984: 143) in her ground-breaking work on Emotions has written,inter alia: Emotions are thoughts somehow felt in flushes, pulses, movements of our livers, minds, hearts, stomachs, skin. They areembodiedthoughts, thoughts seeped with the apprehension that I aminvolved.