Similar, not universal: the cognitive dimensions of conceptual prototypes of basic emotions in English and in Polish.

Abstract

The current study explores the differences in conceptualisation of the prototypical basic emotion lexicalisations (anger, disgust, fear, joy, sadness, surprise) in English and in Polish. Measures of concreteness, imageability and context availability were collected and analysed across the six semantic categories of basic emotions, across different parts of speech and between the self-determined genders of the study participants. The initial results indicate that within these cognitive dimensions the conceptualisations of basic emotions in English and in Polish are only similar on the more general but not the higher levels of conceptualisation. The folk-psychological division between positive and negative emotions and the grammatical parts of speech reveal similar patterns in basic emotion concepts in both Polish and in English. However, on the higher levels of conceptualisations that include specific basic emotion semantic categories and self-identified gender, marked language-specific differences become apparent. Different negative emotions drive the statistical differences in Polish and in English, and the gender effects on the measures of concreteness, imageability and context availability are opposite from one language to the other. In other words, basic emotions may be broadly mutually intelligible, but not exactly the same when communicated across languages and cultures.