Cultural universals: Measuring the semantic structure of emotion terms in English and Japanese

摘要

Research is presented on the semantic struc- ture of 15 emotion terms as measured by judged-similarity tasks for monolingual English-speaking and monolingual and bilingual Japanese subjects. A major question is the relative explanatory power of a single shared model for English and Japanese versus culture-specific models for each language. The data support a shared model for the semantic structure of emotion terms even though some robust and significant differences are found between English and Japanese struc- tures. The Japanese bilingual subjects use a model more like English when performing tasks in English than when per- forming the same task in Japanese.