Components of Emotional Meaning

"Publications on emotion (and the affective sciences in general) have exploded in the last decade. Numerous research teams and individual scholars from many different disciplines have published research papers or books about many different aspects of emotions and their role in behaviour and society. However, one aspect of emotional research that has been somewhat neglected, is the way in which emotional terms translate into other languages. When using terms like anger, sadness, fear, disgust, and joy for so-called basic emotions, as well as terms like shame, guilt, pride, regret and contempt for more complex emotions, it is naturally assumed that the emotion terms used for research in the native language of the researchers and translated into English are completely equivalent in meaning. However, this is not generally the case. In many cases there is no direct one to one relationship between an English term and a term in an alternative language. In fact, there can be significant differences in the way that these seemingly similar emotional terms can be applied across various languages, with important implications for how we review and appraise this work." -- Publisher's website.