Abstract: Many human languages have words for emotions such as “anger” and “fear,” yet it is not clear whether these emotions have similar meanings across languages, or why their meanings might vary. If you’d like to compare and contrast emotional words from across languages, you can check out the database used in the study ((). Recognizing the differences in meaning that do exist could help people from across the world understand each other better, he says. “Scholars since Darwin have been asking whether emotions are universal,” questioning whether primary emotions exist just like primary colors, Jackson says. Taken together, the findings suggest that emotional experiences stem from biology, but the way that we make meaning of these feelings varies across cultures.

According to the study, “happy” never means “regret,” for example. The findings suggest that feelings of positivity and negativity, or physiological arousal, appear to be universal building blocks of emotional experiences, no matter where you are. Emotion semantics may be influenced by both cultural forces and the sensory stimuli that tickle our brains. That suggests patterns of trade, migration, and conquest shaped how we understand emotion.īut despite the differences, a few universal patterns emerged from the analysis, too. They also found that language families with the most similar colexification networks were those that were also the most geographically close together. “‘Love’ was more closely connected with concepts such as ‘want’ and ‘like’ in Western languages,” Jackson says. 'This suggests to us that love may have different meanings in cultures around the world.”

Overall, they found eight different colexifications for love, including: want, like, pity, good, need, happy, look for, and ask. The emotion colexification Jackson and his team found particularly interesting was one between “love” and “pity.” This appeared across several Austronesian and South American languages. The colexification network involving 'surprise' and 'fear.' J.-M.

Finding “love” across culturesĬertain distinctions emerged: For example, in Austronesian languages - a language family spoken throughout maritime Southeast Asia, Madagascar, and the islands of the Pacific Ocean - the word “surprise” is closely associated with the experience of “fear.” Meanwhile, in Tai-Kadai languages - a language family found in mainland Southeast Asia, southern China, and northeast India - “surprise” was more closely associated with the concepts of “hope” and “want.” This study was published this week in Science. With the help of a colexifications database involving 2,472 languages, the team was able to construct networks of colexified emotion concepts and compare them across language families. Jackson and his colleague’s research focused in on the concept of colexification, which is when a word has more than one meaning in a given language. University of North Carolina graduate student and study author Joshua Conrad Jackson tells Inverse that this means that some words equated in translation dictionaries may not actually mean the same thing in practice, causing their true meaning to be lost. In a study of 2,472 languages, researchers reveal that words like “love,” “surprise,” “pity,” and “fear” can have different connotations across cultures. Words in one language used to describe a feeling - whether it be love, fear, or anger - don’t always communicate the same human experience in another language, new research suggests. A rose by any other name would smell as sweet, but things are a bit more complicated when it comes to the names that we give emotions.

Universal database meaning