Pancultural aspects of the human conceptual organization of emotions.

Abstract

This study investigated whether certain elementary properties of the human conceptual system for categorizing emotions are pancultural or are specific to particular languages and cultures. From similarity judgments provided by native speakers, multidimensional scalings of emotion-related words in Gujarati, Croatian, Japanese, Chinese, and English provided evidence of several pancultural properties. In all five languages, emotion-related words ,fell in roughly a circular order in a space definable by two dimensions: pleasure-displeasure and arousal-sleep. Similar results were obtained from unilingual and bilingual subjects.