Tell me how you feel... in so may words...

This project started from a series of observations in emotion psychology and linguistics. First, that certain emotions appear to be universally found in some form in all investigated languages and cultures. Second, that expressions of those emotions across cultures appear to be much more similar in the non-verbal than verbal channels of communication. Third, that the differences in the verbal means of expressing emotions across languages are both marked and difficult to systematically investigate. Fourth, that emotion expressions – both verbal and non-verbal appear to have mental representations organized into prototypical conceptual categories.

For a linguist following this line of reasoning across decades of emotion psychology research the next logical step was to catalogue the words denoting emotions shown to be universal. With a comprehensive catalogue like that the study of emotions in language and the emotion concepts underlying words could be made systematic. Creating parallel catalogues of emotion words in two languages would allow for systematic analyses to discover universal aspects. Creating them based on the same principles but independently (rather than translations from one language to another) would allow for analyzing cultural differences in expression.

To bring such catalogues into existence we needed a selection of emotions shown to be universal and the words that denoted them in two languages. Our universal emotions of choice were the six basic emotions of mainstream emotion psychology: anger, disgust, fear, joy/happiness, sadness, and surprise. Our two languages of choice were English and Polish. From there it was a matter of taking the words commonly used for the basic emotions, trawling dictionaries for their synonyms, and patiently logging them for future analysis. From this process came our first set of surprises.

Our search of dictionaries revealed that English had more than twice the number of words for basic emotions than Polish. It also revealed, that between the two languages different emotions have different number of words denoting them. In English the one category with the largest number of words denoting it was joy, in Polish – sadness with anger as is close second. The structure of these emotion lexicons was also markedly different. Both have significant semantic overlaps, meaning there are words synonymous with two or more (overlapping) categories. In both languages these overlaps are largest between the negative emotions. However, in English there are overlaps with the positive joy and neutral surprise as well – in Polish the latter two do not overlap semantically with the negative emotions. Interestingly, in English the conceptual lynchpin, the only emotion overlapping with every other regardless of whether it is positive or negative, is fear. This is where the differences started for us, but they certainly did not end.

No native speaker knows every word for every emotion in their language. No native speaker uses every word for every emotion in their language. So finding out what words there are was but the first step of the way. From here we moved on to how these words are used…