Can all people experience the same emotions? Yes and no. Studying the languages of the peoples of the world, scientists have found differences both in the names of emotions and in what we understand by these names. It turns out that even universal human experiences in different cultures can have their own shades.
Our speech is directly related to thinking. Even the Soviet psychologist Lev Vygotsky argued that the highest forms of psychological communication inherent in man are possible only because we, people, with the help of thinking generally reflect reality.
Growing up in a certain linguistic environment, we think in our native language, select names for objects, phenomena and feelings from its dictionary, learn the meaning of words from parents and “compatriots” within the framework of our culture. And this means that although we are all human, we may have different ideas, for example, about emotions.
“Even though you call her a rose, at least not …”
How do we, as people of different cultures, think about basic emotions: fear, anger, or, say, sadness? Very different, says Dr. Joseph Watts, a research fellow at the University of Otago and a participant in an international project to study the cross-cultural diversity of emotion concepts. The research team of the project includes psychologists from the University of North Carolina (USA) and linguists from the Max Planck Institute for Natural Science (Germany).
Scientists examined words from 2474 languages belonging to 20 major language families. Using a computational approach, they identified patterns of “colexification,” a phenomenon in which languages use the same word to express semantically related concepts. In other words, scientists were interested in words that meant more than one concept. For example, in Persian, the same word form “ænduh” is used to express grief and regret.
What goes with grief?
By creating huge networks of colexifications, scientists have been able to correlate concepts and their naming words in many languages of the world and have found significant differences in how emotions are reflected in different languages. For example, in the Nakh-Dagestan languages, “grief” goes hand in hand with “fear” and “anxiety”. And in the Tai-Kadai languages spoken in Southeast Asia, the concept of “grief” is close to “regret.” This calls into question the general assumptions about the universal nature of the semantics of emotions.
Nevertheless, the change in the semantics of emotions has its own structure. It turned out that language families that are in close geographical proximity have more similar “views” on emotions than those that are more distant from each other. A likely reason is that a common origin and historical contact between these groups led to a common understanding of emotions.
The researchers also found that for all of humanity there are universal elements of emotional experience that can stem from common biological processes, which means that the way people think about emotions is shaped not only by culture and evolution, but also by biology.
The scale of the project, new technological solutions and approaches make it possible to take a broader look at the opportunities that are opening up in this scientific direction. Watts and his team plan to further explore cross-cultural differences in the definition and naming of mental states.
unnamed feelings
Language and cultural differences sometimes go so far that in the dictionary of our interlocutor there may be a term for a feeling that we are not even used to isolating as something separate.
For example, in Swedish, “resfeber” means both anxiety and joyful anticipation that we experience before a trip. And the Scots have given a special term “tartle” for the panic that we experience when, introducing a person to others, we cannot remember his name. A familiar feeling, isn’t it?
To experience the shame that we feel for another, the British, and after them we, began to use the phrase “Spanish shame” (the Spanish language has its own phrase for indirect embarrassment – “vergüenza ajena”). By the way, in Finnish there is also a name for such an experience – “myötähäpeä”.
Understanding such differences is important not only for scientists. At work or while traveling, many of us have to communicate with representatives of other cultures who speak different languages. Understanding the difference in thought, tradition, rules of conduct, and even the conceptual perception of emotions can be helpful and, in some situations, decisive.