Culture and the categorization of emotions.
Abstract
Some writers assume--and others deny--that all human beings distinguish emotions from nonemotions and divide the emotions into happiness, anger, fear, and so on. A review of ethnographic and cross-cultural studies on (a) emotion lexicons, (b) the emotions inferred from facial expressions, and (c) dimensions implicit in comparative judgments of emotions indicated both similarities and differences in how the emotions are categorized in different languages and cultures. Five hypotheses are reviewed: (a) Basic categories of emotion are pancultural, subordinate categories culture specific; (b) emotional focal points are pancultural, boundaries culture specific; (c) emotion categories evolved from a single primitive category of physiological arousal; (d) most emotion categories are culture specific but can be defined by pancultural semantic primitives; and (e) an emotion category is a script with both culture-specific and pancultural components.
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It makes no sense to elevate categories for anger, sadness, fear, disgust and happiness to a common ethological framework for comparing humans with other animals, when there is ample evidence from linguistics, anthropology and psychology that these categories do not offer a robust, universal framework for comparing humans of different cultures.
“Furthermore, it makes no sense to elevate categories for anger, sadness, fear, disgust and happiness to a common ethological framework for comparing humans with other animals, when there is ample evidence from linguistics, anthropology and psychology that these categories do not offer a robust, universal framework for comparing humans of different cultures (Russell, 1991; Gendron et al., 2014a,b,”
From The theory of constructed emotion: an active inference account of interoception and categorization (2016) · cites this paper as Russell, 1991
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- Authors
- Russell, J. A.
- Affiliations
- University of British Columbia (CA)
- Corresponding author
- Russell, James A.
- Venue
- Psychological Bulletin
- Published
- 1991
- Volume
- 110
- Issue
- 3
- Pages
- 426-450
- ISSN
- 0033-2909 (ISSN-L)
- 1939-1455
- OpenAlex
- W2113022628
- Cited by
- 1,344
- References
- 7
- Citations by year
- 2026: 59 · 2025: 42 · 2024: 59 · 2023: 49 · 2022: 56 · 2021: 51 · 2020: 87 · 2019: 117 · 2018: 47 · 2017: 39 · 2016: 50 · 2015: 49 · 2014: 137 · 2013: 38 · 2012: 33
- FWCI
- 18.09
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
- Locations
- Psychological Bulletin (publishedVersion)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Social Psychology › Cultural Differences and Values
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Experimental and Cognitive Psychology › Categorization, perception, and language
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Social Psychology › Emotions and Moral Behavior
- Keywords
- emotion classification, cross-cultural comparison, emotion lexicon, facial expressions, affective domain, evolutionary origins of emotion, physiological arousal, semantic primitives
- MeSH terms
- Cross-Cultural Comparison, Emotions, Facial Expression, Humans, Interpersonal Relations, Nonverbal Communication
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