Cultural Influences on the Structure of Emotion: An Investigation of Emotional Situations Described by Individuals from Cambodia, Japan, UK and US

摘要

The present study investigated whether people from different cultures associate emotions with events differently, and if these differences are observable in the underlying structure of these emotions. Eighty-two participants from four different countries: Cambodia, Japan, the UK, and the US, were asked to describe situations in which they would feel one of the following ten emotional states: surprise, happiness, excitement, satisfaction, relaxation, sleepiness, sadness, cold anger, hot anger, or fear. A total of 2541 situations were described by the participants and categorized by researchers into 38 groups according to their content; for example achievement, separation, or anxiety. The frequency of content types reported in each emotion varied across the four countries, but a greater consensus was observed for positive emotions than for negative ones. In order to examine the structure of emotions a multiple correspondence analysis was performed with the following three factors: the situations in each content type (38 levels), the country (4 levels) and the emotion (10 levels). The results found that the structure for all four countries demonstrated a dimension of pleasantness, which is in line with a core affect model of emotion affect (e.g., Russell & Barrett, 1999). Cultural variations were also observed, notably, the location of fear (in relation to other emotions) by US participants differed greatly from those of the other countries, suggesting that the relationship between fear and other emotions for people from the US is unique.