Comparing Emotion Words between Languages

Abstract

In words such as happy, sad, angry, and afraid, the English language provides a taxonomy of emotional states. But to what extent is this taxonomy language or culture bound? This article describes a method that compares emotion words in different natural languages. Translations for 14 emotion words in English were obtained for Chinese and Japanese. Native speakers rated the extent to which each emotion named was expressed by each of a standard set of facial expressions. The correlation between the resulting profiles for any two words is the index of their similarity. The method proved sensitive in revealing both overall similarity and specific differences in what had been thought to be translation equivalents.

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