The universality of the semantic structure of emotion terms: Methods for the study of inter- and intra-cultural variability

The issue of cultural universals versus linguistic relativity is currently one of the mast intensely debated topics in sociocultural anthropology. Emo tion terms have long served as a contested area and we provide a brief revi ew. The primary aim of the paper is to introduce methods that facilitate th e objective analysis of empirical findings on the extent to which semantic structure is shared among different languages. The main finding of this pap er is that Chinese-, English-, and Japanese-speaking subjects assign basica lly similar meanings to 15 common emotion terms. The differences among the three languages are genuine and statistically significant but small. One of the particularly impressive aspects of the present findings is the extent to which they are consistent with previous research traditions that posit c ultural and semantic universals. Differences also exist in the performance of Chinese and Japanese bilingual subjects when performing tasks in English compared to performing the same tasks in their native language.