WA Friday Lunch Talk, March 17, 13:15-14:15, Emotion Research in a Whorfian Trap: Language as the Missing Context by dr Halszka Bąk

ABSTRACT

Recently, research on emotion concepts studied through language from an interdisciplinary perspective has grown significantly. The focus has largely been on entire language families and determining factors that can be the source of variability in emotion conceptualization and lexicalization. Here, we present the preliminary results from a series of studies where we analyzed the basic emotion lexicons in English and in Polish. Nouns, verbs, and adjectives synonymous with the basic emotion labels (anger, disgust, fear, joy, sadness, surprise) were collected independently in both languages. The lexicons were compared, followed by a series of studies where we collected measures of valence, arousal, dominance, concreteness, imageability, and context availability. We also gathered familiarity data across our studies to measure their correlation with word frequency data, and we conducted a translation-backtranslation study to determine the level of translation equivalence between the two lexicons. Results indicated that the basic emotion lexicons in Polish and English differ exponentially in size and composition. Additionally, the affective and cognitive measures we collected for the words in the lexicons differ in strength and pattern of correlations. The correlations between scores of familiarity and word frequency were very low, as was the case for scores for translation equivalence. The natural conclusion is that the constructs used in basic emotion research today are heavily English-centric to the detriment of our fundamental understanding of emotion concepts as psychological universals. These results have weighty implications for cross linguistic emotion granularity and bilingualism research, as it places the results from these fields in heretofore missing context of linguistic relativism.

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Halszka Bąk is Assistant Professor of Linguistics at the Faculty of English, Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznan, Poland. Author of “Emotional Prosody Processing for Non-Native English Speakers. Towards an Integrative Emotion Paradigm” (2016). Recipient of the 2017 Sonata 13 grant from the National Science Center, Poland. Member of the Psychonomic Society and of the International Society for Research on Emotions (ISRE). Current research projects focus on the mental representations of emotions, mental lexicons of emotions, emotion granularity, and emotion research methodology.