Description
In this fascinating book, Anna Wierzbicka brings psychological, anthropological and linguistic insights to bear on our understanding of the way emotions are expressed and experienced in different cultures, languages, and culturally-shaped social relations. The expression of emotion in the face, body and modes of speech are all explored and Wierzbicka shows how the bodily expression of emotion varies across cultures and challenges traditional approaches to the study of facial expressions. As well as offering a perspective on human emotions based on the analysis of language and ways of talking about emotion, this intriguing and controversial book attempts to identify universals of human emotion by analysing empirical evidence from different languages and cultures. This book will be invaluable to academics and students of emotion across the social sciences.
Chapter
8 The Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) as a tool for cross-cultural analysis
9 An illustration: "sadness" in English and in Russian
10 The scope of this book
2 Defining emotion concepts: discovering ‘‘cognitive scenarios’’
1 ‘‘Something good happened’’ and related concepts
2 ‘‘Something bad happened’’ and related concepts
3 ‘‘Bad things can happen’’ and related concepts
4 ‘‘I don't want things like this to happen’’ and related concepts
5 Thinking about other people
6 Thinking about ourselves
3 A case study of emotion in culture: German Angst
1 "Angst" as a peculiarly German concept
2 Heidegger's analysis of "Angst"
3 "Angst" in the language of psychology
4 Angst in everyday language
6 The German Angst in a comparative perspective
7 Luther's influence on the German language
8 Eschatological anxieties of Luther's times
9 The meaning of Angst in Luther's writings
10 Martin Luther's inner life and its possible impact on the history of Angst
11 Luther's possible role in the shift from Angst "affliction" to Angst ‘‘anxiety /fear’’
12 The great social and economic anxieties of Luther's times
13 Uncertainty vs. certainty, Angst vs. Sicherheit
1 The human face: a "mirror" or a ‘‘tool’’?
2 From the ‘‘psychology of facial expression’’ to the "semantics of facial expression"
3 "Social" does not mean "voluntary"
4 What kind of "messages" can a face transmit?
5 Messages are not "dimensions"
6 ‘‘The face alone’’ or ‘‘the face in context’’?
7 Analysing facial behaviour into meaningful components
8 Summing up the assumptions
9 In what terms should facial behaviour be described?
10 Humans and primates: a unified framework for verbal, non-verbal, and preverbal communication
11 The meaning of eyebrows drawn together
12 The meaning of ‘‘raised eyebrows’’
13 The meaning of the ‘‘wide open eyes’’ (with immobile eyebrows)
14 The meaning of a down-turned mouth
15 The meaning of tightly pressed lips
16 Conclusion: the what, the how, and the why in the reading of human faces
5 Russian emotional expression
6 Comparing emotional norms across languages and cultures: Polish vs. Anglo-American
2 The scripts of "sincerity"
3 The scripts of interpersonal "warmth"
4 The scripts of "spontaneity"
1 ‘‘Emotional universals’’ - genuine and spurious
2 A proposed set of ‘‘emotional universals’’