Junker, Marie-Odile, & Blacksmith, Louise (2006). Are there emotional universals? Evidence from the Native American language East Cree. Culture & Psychology, 12(3), 275-303. DOI: 10.1177/1354067X06061590
In her study on emotions across languages and cultures, Wierzbicka proposed a set of eleven working hypotheses on emotional universals. We test each of these hypotheses against data newly collected from the Native American language East Cree. Eight of these eleven hypotheses are confirmed, thus giving support to their universality. We offer cross-cultural comparison of anger-like, fear-like and shame-like concepts, and discuss the Cree expression of good and bad feelings, cry and smile, and Cree emotive interjections. Our findings indicate that not all languages commonly use figurative bodily images (‘my heart sank’) or bodily sensations (‘when I heard this, my throat went dry’) to describe cognitively based feelings. The Cree data also cast some doubt on a straightforward universal syntax for combining the primes, as proposed in the current Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) framework. However, we conclude that, for researchers interested in avoiding ethnocentric bias, the NSM approach is on the right track as a tool for cross-cultural, cross-linguistic research on emotions.
Research carried out in consultation with or under the supervision of one or more experienced NSM practitioners
