Are Emotions UNiversal or Culture-Specific?

Anna Wierzbicka

"According to Izard and Buechler (1980:168), the fundamental emotions are 1. interest 2 joy 3 surprise 4 sadness 5 anger 6 disgust 7 contempt 8 fear 9 shame/shyness and 10 guilt."

"English terms of emotion constitute a folk taxonomy, not an objective, culture-free analytical framework, so obviously we cannot assume that English words such as disgust, fear, or shame are clues to universal human concepts or to basic psychological realities. Yet words such as these are usually treated as if they were objective, culture-free 'natural kinds'."

Polish words tesknota and teskknic:

"X teskni do Y -->

X thinks something like this:
I am far away from Y
when I was with Y I felt something good
I want to be with Y now
if I were with Y now I would feel something good
I cannot be with Y now
because of this, X feels something bad.
"Several English words may come to mind as potential translation equivalents of the Polish word (homesick, long, miss, pine, nostalgia) but they all differ from another and from the Polish term as well."

"Both everyday speech and psychologically sensitive literature are full of attempts, often highly successful, to convey feelings for which there is no simple word."

"What is really important, I think, is that the feelings of lek and of tesknota are not sufficently salient in our American culture to have merited lexicalization...lexical differences between lek and guilt, or between tesknic and miss, may not only reflect but also encourage different, culture-specific, modes of hinking and feeling.
Are there any emotion concepts which have been lexically recognized as distinct and identifiable in all languages of the world?
The evidence available suggests that there are no such emotions."

Comparison of the English disgust and the French degout:

Izard (1969) reports that French and American children show very similar patterns of growth of recognition of individual emotions with age. He notes, however, that with respect to disgust there is an unexpected difference: the French slightly exceed the Americans at most age levels. Izard tries to explain this puzzling fact in terms of greater emphasis placed on the culinary art in French culture:"

"...the English word disgust encodes a feeling caused by 'bad and ugly' human actions (or their results), not by food as such. This is not to deny that the English concept 'disgust' contains a reference to 'something like bad taste and an impulse to get something out of one's mouth', but in 'disgust' this reference serves only as a simile."

"From an ENglish speaker's point of view, shame and fear are two different emotions. But form the point of view of speakers of Gidjingali, apparentky they are not, because both are seen in terms of the same impulse to retreat."

"Many languages of the world (for example, Korean, Ewe in West Africa, and JKuman in Papua) don't lexically distinguish shame and embarrassment. In fact, the same word also seems to be applied to situations in which English would use the word shy rather than either embarrassed or ashamed."

"...some tests showed that pre-literate subjects in New Guinea failed to distinguish between fear and surprise."