Wierzbicka, Anna (1999). Emotions across languages and cultures: Diversity and universals. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Abstract:
This ground-breaking book brings psychological, anthropological and linguistic insights to bear on our understanding of the way emotions are expressed and experienced in different cultures, languages and culturally shaped social relations. The expression of emotion in the face, body and modes of speech are all explored. The author shows how the bodily expression of emotion varies across cultures and challenges traditional approaches to the study of facial expressions. As well as offering a new perspective on human emotions based on the analysis of language and ways of talking about emotion, this fascinating and controversial book attempts to identify universals of human emotion by analysing empirical evidence from different languages and cultures.
Table of contents:
- Introduction: feelings, languages, and cultures
- Defining emotion concepts: discovering ‘‘cognitive scenarios’’
- A case study of emotion in culture: German Angst
- Reading human faces
- Russian emotional expression
- Comparing emotional norms across languages and cultures: Polish vs. Anglo-American
- Emotional universals
More information:
Chapter 3 builds on: Angst (1998)
Chapter 4 builds on: Reading human faces: Emotion components and universal semantics (1993)
Chapter 5 builds on: Russian emotional expression (1998)
Various parts of other chapters build on: Emotion, language, and ‘‘cultural scripts’’ (1994)
Rating:
Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners
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