Super Title

Emotion Review
Vol. 1, No. 1 (Jan. 2009) 3–14
© 2009 SAGE Publications and
The International Society
for Research on Emotion
Language and Metalanguage: Key Issues in ISSN 1754-0739
DOI: 10.1177/1754073908097175
Emotion Research http://emr.sagepub.com

Anna Wierzbicka
School of Language Studies, The Australian National University, Australia

Abstract
Building on the author’s earlier work, this paper argues that language is a key issue in understanding human emotions and that treat-
ing English emotion terms as valid analytical tools continues to be a roadblock in the study of emotions. Further, it shows how the
methodology developed by the author and colleagues, known as NSM (from Natural Semantic Metalanguage), allows us to break free
of the “shackles” (Barrett, 2006) of English psychological terms and explore human emotions from a culture-independent
perspective. The use of NSM makes it possible to study human emotions from a genuinely cross-linguistic and cross-cultural, as well
as a psychological, perspective and thus “opens up new possibilities for the scientific understanding of subjectivity and psychologi-
cal experience” (Goddard, 2007).

Keywords
“basic emotions,” emotions and cultural scripts, language in emotion research, new ways of studying subjectivity, NSM methodology

Exploring Human Emotions through
Universal Human Concepts
I want to focus on two points in this article. First, how difficult it
is to understand, and to describe, human emotions across
languages and cultures. Second, how the use of the methodology
developed in linguistic semantics and known as NSM (Natural
Semantic Metalanguage) can help us to understand human emotions
better—especially emotions of people from other cultures, but also
those of people from our own cultural sphere.
I will take as my starting point the account of Jesus’ emo-
tions given in St. Mark’s Gospel, in two different translations,
one English and one Russian. This account is a unique example
of a description of human emotions which has been rendered in
hundreds of different languages, often with considerable differ-
ences in the interpretation and emphasis. Since the story, the
situation, and the context are the same, the different versions
offer us an opportunity for a unique case study, testing the
accessibility of human emotional experience to culture-
independent interpretation and understanding (see the second
section, “Jesus’ Suffering in Gethsemane”).
It seems hardly necessary to argue at great length that simple
words like sad and afraid, in English, are very crude tools for
describing and interpreting the whole range of human emotions—
even among native speakers of the same language (cf. Barrett, 2006;
Barrett, Lindquist, & Gendron, 2007; Barrett, Mesquita, Ochsner,
& Gross, 2007; see also Wierzbicka, 1973). But if this is so for peo-
ple who share the same linguistic and cultural background, it is
much more so for those who do not—as anyone who has extended
cross-linguistic and cross-cultural experience would know.
In fact, people who live their lives through two languages
know well that when they try to describe the same experience in
their two different languages they are often forced to present it
differently in each, because emotion words in the two languages
do not match (e.g., Besemeres, 2002; Besemeres & Wierzbicka,
2007; Pavlenko, 2005, 2006).
Cross-linguistic semantics agrees with the literature document-
ing the experience of bilinguals on this point. For example, seman-
tic studies show that Russian does not have an exact equivalent of
the English word sad, although it has two words usually trans-
lated into English as sad, each with a somewhat different meaning
(Wierzbicka, 1998a, see also J. D. Apresjan, 1979). Malay doesn’t

Author note: I would like to thank Cliff Goddard for his extensive and extremely helpful comments on an earlier version of this paper. I am also grateful to the anonymous
reviewers of Emotion Review, whose suggestions and queries have helped me to improve this article.
Corresponding author: Anna Wierzbicka, School of Language Studies, Baldessin Precinct Building (#110), The Australian National University, Canberra ACT 0200, Australia.
Email: anna.wierzbicka@anu.edu.au
4 Emotion Review Vol. 1 No. 1
have a word matching in meaning the English word surprised,
because the closest word it has always implies something bad,
whereas in English “surprise” can be bad, good, or neutral
(Goddard, 1997, 2007). Many languages don’t have a word
matching in meaning the English word happy, and, for example,
the closest counterparts of happy in German or in Russian imply
an emotion more intense than that described by the present-day
English happy (e.g., Levontina & Zalizniak, 2001; Wierzbicka,
2004). Examples could be multiplied. (e.g., V. J. Apresjan, 1997;
Goddard, 1991, 1996, 1997; Harkins & Wierzbicka, 2001;
Wierzbicka, 1992a, 1999; see also Russell, 1991).
Contemporary psychology, like present-day science in general,
is dominated by English, and it is common practice for scholars to
write about human emotions using English emotion terms, as if
these English words could give us an accurate, objective and
culture-independent perspective on human emotional experience
in general. The justification usually offered for this practice is that
English emotion terms can be used as “scientific concepts,” inde-
pendent of ordinary English usage. In fact (as I will discuss more
fully later), such “scientific” concepts, which Anglophone schol-
ars derive, unwittingly, from their native language, preclude,
rather than facilitate, a culture-independent perspective: in reality,
any discussion of human emotions which relies on English emo-
tion terms is necessarily Anglocentric (Wierzbicka, 2006).
A common response to such a critique is that “what psychol-
ogists are interested in is not emotion words but emotions as
such.” This response misses the point that we need to understand
emotion words in order to have any chance of understanding
“emotions as such.” Much of the emotion research so far has been
heavily influenced by the folk concepts of emotion encoded in
the English lexicon; and so-called “scientific concepts of emo-
tion” tend in fact to derive, unwittingly, from such folk concepts.
This does not mean that it is impossible to talk about human
emotions in English without an Anglocentric bias. As dozens of
descriptive studies in the NSM framework (see below) have
demonstrated, it is entirely possible to do so—if instead of rely-
ing on English emotion terms, all of which are language- and
culture-specific, one relies on a methodology based on univer-
sal human concepts. This methodology, developed and tested
extensively over many years, is known as NSM (Natural
Semantic Metalanguage).
The Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) is a mini-
language which corresponds to the intersection—the common
core—of all languages. This intersection of all languages has
been discovered empirically, through extensive cross-linguistic
studies undertaken by many scholars over many years (see e.g.,
Goddard & Wierzbicka, 1994, 2002). Describing languages and
cultures in NSM, and through NSM, means describing them in
terms of simple and universal human concepts, which can be
found as words (or word-like elements) in all languages (see
Table 1). This applies to emotions as much as to any other
domain: by using NSM, we can explore human emotions from
a universal point of view, independent of any particular lan-
guages and cultures. (For references, see the NSM homepage:
www.une.edu.au/lcl/nsm/index.php.)
This paper is organized as follows. In the second section,
“Jesus’ Suffering in Gethsemane,” I will illustrate, with reference
to Jesus in Gethsemane, how different languages impose differ-
ent interpretations on human emotions, and how NSM methodol-
ogy allows us to explore emotions without imposing on them a
culture-specific, Anglocentric interpretation. In the third section,
“Reading Human Faces,” I will examine the theory of “basic
emotions,” allegedly associated with biologically pre-
programmed facial expressions, and I will contrast its Anglocentric
slant with the culture-independent NSM approach to emotions. In
the fourth section, “‘Universal Themes’: ‘Sadness’ and ‘Loss’,” I
will discuss the culture-specific character of so-called “universal
themes,” such as the theme of “loss,” allegedly associated with
the “universal emotion” of sadness. In the fifth section,
“Reification of Concepts Derived from English,” I will argue that,
apart from “basic emotions” and “universal themes” advanced by
Paul Ekman (and others), several other prominent psychological
approaches to human emotions are also affected by reification of
concepts derived from English. In the sixth section, “What Are
‘Subjective Feeling States’ and How Can They Be Explored,” I
will show how “subjective feeling states” can be explored
through prototypical cognitive scenarios formulated in universal
human concepts. In my concluding remarks I will draw the dif-
ferent threads of the preceding discussion together to conclude
that language is a key issue in emotion research.
Jesus’ Suffering in Gethsemane
Jesus’ emotions in Gethsemane have been described in well
over a thousand languages. They have also been portrayed in
many paintings. So what exactly did Jesus feel—as far as we
know—when he was praying in Gethsemane anticipating his
“Passion” and crucifixion? Mark’s Gospel (The Revised
Standard Version) describes it like this:
33. And he took with him Peter and James and John, and began to be
greatly distressed and troubled. 34. And he said to them, “My soul is very
sorrowful, even to death, remain here, and watch.” (Mark 14: 33–34)
In a recent Russian translation by Sergej Averincev (2007),
however, the impression conveyed is significantly different:
33.... I nacal On cuvstvovat’ uzas i tomlenie, 34. i govorit im: “V smertnoj
muke duša Moja; pobud’te zdes’ i bodrstvujte.”
The Russian word užas implies something like a combination of
terror and horror (and tomlenie implies something like tor-
ment). This is a very different interpretation of Jesus’ emotions
from that implied by the English adjectives distressed and troubled.
Trying to get closer to Mark’s intended meaning, one could
ask, of course: which of the two interpretations corresponds
two verbs, ekthambeīsthai and adēmonein, which don’t have
more closely to the Greek original? But the Greek version uses
exact semantic equivalents in either English or Russian.
Furthermore, Mark was not a native speaker of Greek, and the
meanings he sought to convey are likely to have been colored
by his native Aramaic, and by the Hebrew of his own religious
tradition. We don’t know exactly, then, what precisely he sought
to convey by the Greek words which he chose.

Table 1. Universal human concepts—English exponents.
Substantives
Relational substantives:
Determiners:
Quantifiers:
Evaluators:
Descriptors:
Mental predicates:
Speech:
Actions, events, movement, contact:
Location, existence,
possession, specification:
Life and death:
Time:
Space:
Logical concepts:
Intensifier, augmentor:
Similarity:
Note. Primes exist as the meanings of lexical units (not at the level of lexemes). Exponents of primes may be words, bound morphemes, or phrasemes. They
can be formally complex. They can have different morphosyntactic properties, including word-class, in different languages. They can have combinatorial
variants (allolexes). Each prime has well-specified syntactic (combinatorial) properties.
As is often the case in interpreting the Gospels, here, too, we
can expect some help from the context—both linguistic and
non-linguistic. To start with the non-linguistic context, we will
note, first, that according to Mark’s version, Jesus “fell on the
ground and prayed”; and second, that in Luke’s version, his
sweat “became like great drops of blood falling down upon the
ground” (Luke 22:44, Revised Standard Version). Thus, what-
ever exactly the two Greek verbs used by Mark meant at the
time when he was writing his Gospel, in interpreting Jesus’
emotions in Gethsemane we need to keep our interpretation
consistent with the information about his falling to the ground
to pray and about the heavy drops of his sweat falling down to
the ground, like drops of blood.
As for the linguistic context, of crucial importance here is
Mark’s verse 34, in which Jesus himself describes his own emo-
tional state. But of course Jesus’ words, too, come to us through
Mark’s Greek. As already mentioned, the Revised Standard
Version translates these words as: “My soul is very sorrowful,
even to death.”
The Russian counterpart of this verse (in Averincev’s trans-
lation) is “v smertnoj muke duša moja,” roughly, “my soul is in
mortal agony,” so again, it is quite different in meaning from the
Revised Version. What was Jesus really saying—“I am in
agony” or “I am very sorrowful”? The word sorrow implies,
roughly speaking, thinking about something very sad, whereas
the Russian phrase smertnaja muka implies terrible suffering
both physical and psychological, and not just mental suffering.
In the English version, it is Jesus’ sorrow which seems to him
so great that he could die from it; in the Russian version, on the
Wierzbicka Language and Metalanguage 5
I, YOU, SOMEONE, SOMETHING/THING, PEOPLE,
BODY
KIND, PART
THIS, THE SAME, OTHER/ELSE
ONE, TWO, MUCH/MANY, SOME, ALL
GOOD, BAD
BIG, SMALL
THINK, KNOW, WANT, FEEL, SEE, HEAR
SAY, WORDS, TRUE
DO, HAPPEN, MOVE, TOUCH
BE (SOMEWHERE), THERE IS
HAVE, BE (SOMEONE/SOMETHING)
LIVE, DIE
WHEN/TIME, NOW, BEFORE, AFTER, A LONG TIME,
A SHORT TIME, FOR SOME TIME, MOMENT
WHERE/PLACE, HERE, ABOVE, BELOW, FAR, NEAR,
SIDE, INSIDE
NOT, MAYBE, CAN, BECAUSE, IF
VERY, MORE
LIKE
other hand, it is his total suffering—his pain, his agony—which
seems to him so great that he could die from it. These are very
different images of Jesus, of his words and of his attitude.
We must ask again: what does Jesus say in the Greek origi-
nal (in Mark’s version)? Here, one problem is that the model of
the person assumed in the Greek version is different from that
assumed by either English or Russian. In the Greek version,
Jesus says that his “psychē” is “perilypos.” This raises two
questions: what is psychē and what is perilypos?
As the use of perilypos in other parts of the New
Testament makes clear, perilypos does not correspond exact-
ly to any one of the English words chosen for it in the Revised
Standard Version (“sad, sorrow, distressed”). But neither does
it correspond exactly to Averincev’s v smertnoj muke (“in
mortal pain, in agony”). There is simply no word in either
English or Russian which would match the meaning of the
Greek word perilypos—or the emotion apparently attributed
to Jesus by Mark. Furthermore, whatever the exact meaning
of the adjective perilypos (as intended by Mark), this feeling
is attributed not to Jesus’ “soul” (as the Revised Standard
Version puts it) but to his “psychē”—and for “psychē” there
is no exact word in English either (Wierzbicka, 1992a).
The Greek construct psychē invoked in Jesus’ words (in
Mark’s version) implies that he is suffering a great pain in the
core of his being: not just in his “soul” (as opposed to his
“body”) but in his total being. Presumably, this is the basis for
Averincev’s translation smertnaja muka “mortal pain, agony,”
which implies an emotion more total, and less thought-based,
than sorrow.
6 Emotion Review Vol. 1 No. 1
So what exactly was Jesus (as portrayed by Mark) saying
about his psychē—his self, the core of his being—when he
said that it was “perilypos even to death,” or “mortally perily-
pos”? It is clear that no single word in English—for example,
sad, sorrowful, or distressed—can capture this meaning, and
neither can any combination of such words, because each of
these words would bring with it its own additional compo-
nents not included in the Greek meaning. We can, however, try
to capture this meaning with precision by means of a set of
simpler semantic components formulated in universal human
concepts, that is, in NSM-English, as in the following (partial)
formula:
[A] And he said to them: my “psychē” is “perilypos” [“very sad,
deeply distressed”], “even to death” (Mark 14:34). =
and he said to them something like this:
“something very bad is happening to me now
I feel something very bad because of this
I can’t not feel like this
I can’t not think like this now: ‘I can die because of this’”
Let us now return to Mark’s verse 33, where Jesus is described
(in Greek) as ekthambeisthai. The Greek–English Lexicon of
the New Testament (Newman, 1971) glosses this verb as “to be
moved to a relatively intense emotional state because of some-
thing causing great surprise or perplexity, be overwhelmed, be
alarmed”; and the adjective ekthambos as “utterly astonished.”
Obviously, the English word distressed, chosen by the
Revised Standard Version to translate the Greek word, lacks
one component reflected in such glosses: that of unexpected-
ness. Nor is the meaning of the Greek original adequately cap-
tured by the Russian word užas (“terror/horror”), chosen in
Averincev’s translation. Užas is a very dramatic word. It sug-
gests that the emotion was very intense and “overpowering,”
and it clearly includes some components absent from the
Greek ekthambeisthai. Jesus prayed: “Abba, Father, for you all
things are possible; remove this cup from me; yet not what I
want but what you want” (New Revised Standard Version).
Užas, like terror, implies an unqualified “I don’t want this to
happen,” and this doesn’t quite seem to match the combination
of a desire to be spared and a willingness not to be spared if
this is God’s will.
Thus, both the Russian word uzas and the English word dis-
tressed are too blunt as tools for analyzing Jesus’ emotions in
Gethsemane. A more fine-grained interpretation, compatible
with all the linguistic and extra-linguistic clues, can be given in
the form of a set of components formulated in simple and uni-
versal human concepts, such as the following:
[B] Jesus began to “ekthambeisthai” and “adēmonein” (Mark 14:33) =
after this, Jesus was thinking like this for some time:
“I know: something very bad will happen to me in a short time
I feel something very bad because of this
I can’t not think like this now: ‘I don’t want it to happen’
I didn’t know before that it would be like this”
when he was thinking like this, he felt something very bad
because of this,
like someone can feel when they think like this for some time
This formula is not offered here as an explication of the Greek
words as such but as my hypothesis about Mark’s intended mes-
sage about Jesus’ emotions, as he understood them. It is meant
of course as an approximation, but what I am seeking here is the
closest possible approximation compatible with the linguistic
and extra-linguistic context and free from “foreign” cultural
admixtures inherent in the English and Russian translations.
Clearly, Averincev’s Russian Jesus is emotionally more
intense and more extreme than the Jesus of the Revised
Standard Version. In relation to the Greek original, the Russian
Jesus is emotionally somewhat overstated, whereas the Anglo/
English Jesus is somewhat understated. The Russian Jesus
admits to being, roughly speaking, terrified of what is going to
happen to him and even horrified at the prospect. The Anglo/
English Jesus, on the other hand, is merely “distressed” and
“troubled.”
In saying this, I do not mean to criticize either translation. A
translation has to rely on words which sound natural in a given
language. Perhaps the Russian word uzas and the English word
distressed are indeed the best options available in these two lan-
guages to render the Greek word ekthambeisthai as used by
Mark (14: 33) in this particular context. It is important to recog-
nize, however, that each translation presents Jesus’ state of mind
and heart in a different light, and that each of them brings with
it a particular, language-specific and culturally slanted interpre-
tation. It is also important to recognize that we can get a better
understanding of Jesus’ emotions if we try to understand them
not only through the emotion terms of a particular language (for
example, English, Russian, or even Greek), but also through
simple and universal human concepts.
The semantic components proposed here—“I know: some-
thing very bad will happen to me in a short time” and “I can’t
not think like this now: I don’t want it to happen”—strike a
compromise between the Russian and the English versions,
consistent with the Greek account but stated in universal human
concepts. No such compromise is possible if we use standard
adjectives like afraid and sad, or nouns like fear and sadness,
which are used by many psychologists to identify the so-called
basic emotions (e.g., Ekman, 2004; Ekman & Friesen, 1975)—
a point to which I will return shortly. By using such terms one
is necessarily introducing an Anglo/English perspective on the
emotions attributed to Jesus by the Gospels.
The same applies to the explication of Mark’s verse 34 pro-
posed here. Whatever the exact meaning of the Greek word
perilypos was, and whatever the meaning which Mark sought to
convey by means of this word in combination with psychē, it
seems safe to attribute to Mark, and through him, to Jesus, the
components “something very bad is happening to me now” and
“I feel something very bad because of this.” The two further
components: “I can’t not feel like this” and “I can’t not think
like this now: I can die because of this” appear to be also com-
patible with all the clues from the linguistic and extralinguistic
context.
Given what we know about “Russian emotional scripts” and
“Anglo emotional scripts” (e.g., Šmelev, 2002; Wierzbicka,
1998b, 2002, 2006; Zalizniak, Levontina, & Šmelev, 2005), that
is, tacit cultural norms relating to emotions, it is of course not

an accident that the Russian Jesus is emotionally somewhat dif-
ferent from the Anglo/English Jesus. Nor is it an accident that
English doesn’t have a word like uzas, which combines most
elements of terror and horror and at the same time is extremely
colloquial and is commonly used to both describe and express
emotions.
Emotion terms are always language- and culture-specific
and therefore carry with them a particular linguistic and cultural
slant. By contrast, cognitive scenarios formulated in simple and
universal human concepts can be free of any such slant and
therefore can be closer to the reality of emotional experience.
The use of NSM allows us to compare emotion concepts across
languages and cultures, and thus to elucidate both cultural
differences and transcultural similarities.
Obviously, Christians and others who see Jesus as the most
perfect human being have special reasons to be interested in
Jesus’ emotions in general, and on that night in Gethsemane in
particular. For students of emotions, whether or not they are par-
ticularly interested in Jesus, the night in Gethsemane offers a
perfect example of the difficulties and the challenges involved in
trying to understand human emotions across languages, transla-
tions and cultures. This applies both to emotions felt and the
emotions expressed in the human face, to which I will now turn.
Reading Human Faces
Can we read sadness, fear, or surprise in other people’s faces?
As the discussion so far should make clear, the answer to such
questions is not straightforward.
The idea that a face expresses “sadness” depends, to some
extent, on the concept of “sadness” encoded in the English word
sadness: since, for example, Tahitian has no word for “sadness,”
a Tahitian will not read a human face as “sad” (Levy, 1973;
Wierzbicka, 1999). This doesn’t mean that people with differ-
ent linguistic backgrounds can never “read” the expression of
a human face in the same way. It only means that they can’t
“read” it in the same way by means of one word—one emotion
term—like sad, frightened, or surprised. They can read it in the
same way if they read it in universal human concepts, present as
words or phrases in all languages.
Despite a great deal of cultural variation (e.g., Ye, 2004,
2006) the emotional language of the face is to a considerable
extent universal, and not dependent on language-specific vocab-
ulary of emotions. For example, if the corners of the mouth are
raised, this is universally interpreted as “I feel something good,”
whereas if the corners of the mouth are lowered, this is univer-
sally interpreted as “I feel something bad.” The topic of how we
read human faces is a huge one (see Wierzbicka, 1999), and
cannot be discussed here in any detail. I want, however, to make
two points.
First, when we read a human face as “sad” or “frightened,”
we are partly reading these emotions into the face, in addition
to what we find in the face itself. In other words, when we are
“reading” a face, we are guided partly by universal clues from
facial semantics, such as that the lowering of the corners of the
mouth signals (in part) “I feel something bad,” and partly, by the
Wierzbicka Language and Metalanguage 7
lexical categorization embodied in the language in which we
are thinking about it.
Second, the meanings expressed in a human face—like those
experienced by the human heart—can be very complex and
rich. This complexity and richness cannot be captured accur-
ately and faithfully in single words of one particular language.
To a very considerable extent, however, it can be understood
through complex cognitive scenarios formulated in simple and
universal human concepts. The key point is that English words
like anger, sadness and happiness don’t necessarily match emo-
tion terms in other languages. Rather, every language, through
its lexicon, imposes its own interpretations on human emo-
tional experience, and that this applies to English as much as to
any other language. The persistent practice of treating English
emotion terms as valid analytical tools, especially in relation to
so-called “basic emotions,” amounts to the reification of the
concepts encoded in them (see the section on the “Reification of
Concepts Derived from English”).1
Ekman, who is a classic exponent of this practice, seemed to
recognize at one point the methodological problem involved in
using English emotion terms as analytical and interpretive tools,
and in his New Guinea research in the late 1960s he used sim-
ple stories describing a social situation. As he recounts in his
book Emotions Revealed, the stories “were pretty simple:
‘his/her friends have come and s/he is happy; s/he is angry and
about to fight; his/her child died and s/he feels very sad/; a wild
pig is standing at the door and the man (woman) is looking at
the pig and is very afraid of it.” (2004, p. 9).
The use of such simple stories is no doubt a very helpful tech-
nique in talking with New Guineans about emotions. As these
examples make clear, however, in addition to the pictures, Ekman
relied on multiple translations of emotion words: from English
into Tok Pisin, from Tok Pisin into Fore, from Fore into Tok
Pisin, and from Tok Pisin back into English. As he puts it himself,
“I did not know the Fore language, but with the help of a few boys
who had learned Pidgin from a missionary school, I could go
from English to Pidgin to Fore and back again” (p. 7). He con-
cluded that “the results were clear-cut for happiness, anger, dis-
gust, and sadness,” although he also noted that “fear and surprise
were not distinguished from each other.” Thus, as I pointed out in
Emotions across Languages and Cultures, in interpreting the
results of his investigations, Ekman fell back on the English emo-
tion terms that he had started with. (2004, p. 10).2
As the title of my 1999 book Emotions across Languages
and Cultures: Diversity and Universals indicates, I agree with
Ekman and other “universalists” that, along with diversity, there
are indeed certain constants in human emotional experience,
and also in facial and bodily expression of emotions. As I have
argued in Emotions and elsewhere, however, the only way to
avoid ethnocentric bias in trying to articulate these universals is
to draw on the set of empirically discovered universal human
concepts. This applies not only to so-called “basic emotions,”
but to human emotions in general, regardless of the level of
their complexity, stability, or duration.
For example, Ekman (2004, p. 69) writes: “We know from
scientific study that two emotions can occur in rapid sequence,
8 Emotion Review Vol. 1 No. 1
again and again. Two emotions also can merge together into a
blend.” In keeping with this idea, to describe the emotions of a
woman whose young son had been viciously murdered, Ekman
relies on a combination of two English words, sadness and
agony. But in fact one cannot escape the Anglocentrism of
English emotion terms by using them in tandem rather than
singly. For example, we cannot give a plausible account of
Jesus’ emotions in Gethsemane by calling them a blend, or a
succession, of “sadness” and “agony”—any such account inter-
preting Jesus’ emotions through the prism of English words is
necessarily Anglocentric.
Words define reality for us (Donald, 2001, p. 294), and this
applies to emotional experience as much as to any other
domain. But with the exception of 63 conceptual primes, which
appear to be “hard-wired” in human beings, “every word is a
cultural invention” (Donald, 2001, p. 291). The “reality” pre-
sented to native speakers of English by English words like
sadness and agony is different from that presented to native
speakers of Russian by Russian words like uzas and tomlenie,
because all these words are in fact “cultural inventions,” and so
are the concepts encoded in them. But concepts like “think,”
“feel,” “want,” and “know” or “do” and “happen,” or “good”
and “bad,” or “body,” are not “cultural inventions,” and so these
do offer us reliable language-independent tools for the analysis
and interpretation of human realities.
“Universal Themes”: “Sadness” and “Loss”
Ekman is, I believe, on much firmer ground when he suggests
that some universals of human emotions can be captured in
terms of what he calls “the universal themes” (2004, p. 25). He
argues that “the themes are given, not acquired; it is only
the variations and elaborations of the themes that are learned”
(p. 26), and he notes, with reference to some of the most
prominent emotion researchers, that “Frijda, Lazarus and
Scherer all agree with this view” (p. 250).
The clearest example of such a “universal theme” is given in
relation to “fear,” which is characterized as “danger of physical
harm” (p. 152), and also, as “an intense, immediate danger”
(p. 160). This is far too restrictive, but the basic idea of some-
thing like “danger” is consistent with the following prototypical
scenario, couched exclusively in universal human concepts:
[C] this someone felt something bad at that time
like people can feel when they feel something because they
think like this:
“something very bad can happen to me
I don’t want it to happen”
Evidence from cross-linguistic semantics is consistent with the
hypothesis that the “theme” formulated above plays a signifi-
cant role in human emotional experience in all societies and is
reflected in all languages and cultures. Things are far less clear,
however, with regard to other “themes” proposed by Ekman
and others, for example, the theme of what Ekman refers to as
“sadness.”
Referring to the work of his colleagues Jerry Boucher and
Klaus Scherer, Ekman (2004, p. 23) writes:
They both found evidence of universals—the same kind of triggers were
reported to evoke the same emotions across different cultures. . . . For
example, in every culture loss of something important was the trigger
for sadness, but exactly what that loss was reported to be varied from
one culture to another.
Thus, the claim is that people in all cultures experience “the
same emotion,” namely “sadness,” and that in every culture this
emotion is triggered by the “loss of something important.” But
what is the justification for linking, for example, the experience
of Jesus in Gethsemane with the English concept of “loss”?
The English word loss refers, in its basic meaning, to one’s
possessions: at one time, I have something good (valuable),
then something happens not because I want it to happen, and
after this, because of this, I don’t have this good (valuable) thing
any more. In modern English, this loss of possessions has
become a pervasive metaphor for misfortune in general—first
of all, for “losing” someone through death, and then, for all
kinds of other misfortunes, calamities, and disappointments.
In particular, in Anglophone psychology and popular psy-
chology, “loss” has become a central metaphor for all kinds of
misfortunes. There are countless books in English with titles
such as Grief and Loss, Loss and Trauma, Adaptation to Loss,
The A to Z of Loss: The Handbook for Healthcare, and so on
and so on. There are no such titles in French, Spanish, or
German. Similarly, while one can do a PhD in “loss,” one can-
not do a PhD in “la perte,” “perdida” or “Verlust.” (For exam-
ple, one title of a PhD thesis included in my university’s library
catalogue reads: “Themes of loss in the cello music of Peter
Sculthorpe.” This title could not be translated into other
European languages with words like perte, perdida or Verlust.)
The word loss is so central to contemporary Anglophone
psychology and popular psychology that even lifelong misfor-
tunes tend to be seen through the prism of this metaphor. For
example, among countless books on “death and loss” one also
finds titles like the following one: Chronic Sorrow: A Living
Loss. The first paragraph of the introduction explains: “When
impairment is permanent and the child continues to live, the
loss is continuing; therefore, sorrow persists.”
This is a highly culture-specific way of looking at human
life. The way the word loss is used here reflects a perspective on
life which is anything but universal. There is no evidence what-
soever that people all over the world think about their misfor-
tunes in terms of such a metaphor, quite the contrary.
Take for example the book of Job in the Hebrew Bible—per-
haps the greatest outpouring of emotions due to misfortune in
world literature. The vocabulary, phraseology, and metaphorical
representation of what in English might be called “grief” and
“sadness” is extraordinarily rich and varied in Job. But there is
not a single mention of “loss.” For example:
16:16 My face is flushed from weeping, And on my eyelids is the
shadow of death.
17:1 My spirit is broken

My days are extinguished
The grave is ready for me.
17:7 My eye has become dim because of sorrow and all my members
are like shadows.
17:11 My days are past,
My purposes are broken off.
English-speaking psychologists tend to simply take it for granted
that the metaphor of “loss,” which speaks to them, is central to
universal human experience. This assumption is unfounded.
There may well be a plausible cognitive scenario associated,
universally, with tears and down-turned mouth, but if there is
such a scenario, it is certainly not one which can be plausibly
articulated in terms of the language-specific English concept
of loss, the English-based metaphor of “loss,” or the English
word sadness.
Reification of Concepts Derived from English
From a linguistic point of view, a major problem with many
past and present approaches to emotions is the widespread ten-
dency to reify certain concepts which are derived from English
(modern English), and which are, in an important sense, cre-
ations of it. This applies both to the concept of “emotion” itself
(Dixon, 2003; Mandler, 1975; Russell, 1991; Wierzbicka,
1999), and to more specific concepts like “anger,” “sadness,”
“shame” or “gratitude.”
For example, when the primatologist Frans de Waal (2006,
p. 20) contrasts two kinds of emotions, “non-moral” and
“moral,” as follows: “Emotions such as gratitude and resent-
ment directly concern one’s own interests . . . hence they are too
egocentric to be moral. Moral emotions . . . deal with good and
bad at a more abstract, disinterested level,” this reflects an
assumption that “an emotion of gratitude” and “an emotion of
resentment” exist, that they are language-independent realities.
Similarly, when Fontaine, Scherer, Roesch, and Ellsworth, (2007)
say, in relation to what they call the “dimension of potency/control,”
that “on this dimension, emotions such as pride, anger and contempt
are opposed to sadness, shame and despair” (p. 1051), they appear to
assume that English words like pride, anger, sadness, and shame
correspond to some realities independent of these words and of the
concepts encoded in them. Likewise, when they write that “for many
clinical and applied studies, it is crucial to distinguish whether a per-
son is experiencing fear or anger” (p. 1056), they appear to assume
that the English words fear and anger stand for two discrete,
language-independent “emotions.”
This assumption is unfounded. Concepts like “anger,”
“sadness” and “shame” are folk concepts and belong to the folk
psychology embedded in the English language. By careful
semantic analysis of such concepts we can find out what con-
struals speakers of English impose on their experiences. Such
information about folk construal of human experience can be
extremely valuable, but it should not be regarded as a valid
basis for assuming that English folk concepts like “sadness,”
“anger” and “shame” “cut nature at its joints.”
The culture-specific character of the categorization of emo-
tion reflected in English words is now increasingly recognized
Wierzbicka Language and Metalanguage 9
by psychologists, but the extent of the linguistic and con-
ceptual diversity in this area is still greatly underestimated.
To give just one example, when Ellsworth and Scherer (2003,
p. 588) say that “fear, anger and grief are categories that come
naturally to people and that seem to have considerable cross-
linguistic generality,” they overlook the fact that, for example,
English grief has no counterparts in French, German, Russian
or Polish, not to mention languages further afield (Wierzbicka,
2003).
Of course, psychological realities may themselves differ, to
some extent, between different cultures (and lingua-cultures).
As Scherer (2000) himself put it, “cultural values can strongly
affect appraisal” (p. 152) and there may be “as many different
emotional states as there are different patterns of appraisal
results” (p. 149)—that is, there may be different appraisals, and
different emotional states, in different cultures.
It needs to be recognized, however, that the English emotion
lexicon is just as culture-specific as any other, and that even con-
cepts as “natural” to speakers of English as “grief” are not univer-
sal and cannot be relied upon as neutral analytical tools for talk-
ing about human emotions in general. What is needed is a cul-
ture-independent metalanguage for emotion research (Goddard,
2007) and English words like grief are not culture-independent.
The frequently expressed hope that we can somehow over-
come the problem by using words like sadness, anger, and shame
in some “scientific sense,” rather than in the ordinary sense (e.g.,
Griffiths, 1997, see the “Concluding Remarks”), is defeated by the
observation that words usually pressed into service to define such
“scientific sense”—for example, loss, goal, control, arousal or
affect—are themselves culture-specific English words, which do
not free the analyst from terminological ethnocentrism (Goddard,
2007) but only drive this ethnocentrism deeper under the surface
of “scientific” emotionological discourse.
From a linguistic (and cross-linguistic) point of view, the
solution to such problems is to start from the bedrock of human
concepts that are indeed universal, like “feel,” “think,” “know,”
“want,” “do,” “happen,” and “body,” and to make them the foun-
dation of emotion research. If we do this, we can ask questions
about what people feel, what they think, what they want, and
what happens in their bodies when they think, want, and feel, and
also about how their ways of thinking and feeling correlate with
what happens in their bodies (including of course the brain),
or with what they want to do with their bodies, or parts of their
bodies, at the moment when they experience these feelings.
Scherer (2000) has proposed the following “working defini-
tion of emotion” (“for which one finds increasing consensus in
the literature”):
Emotions are episodes of coordinated changes in several components
(including at least neurophysiological activation, motor expression, and
subjective feeling but possibly also action tendencies and cognitive
processes) in response to external or internal events of major signifi-
cance to the organism. (p.138)
Given that emotion is a construct of modern English, I would
see this statement not as a definition of some objective reality
but as a program of research. This program can be easily
10 Emotion Review Vol. 1 No. 1
rephrased in terms of studying the correlations between think-
ing, feeling, wanting, what happens in the body, and what one
wants to do with one’s body, or parts of one’s body.
Essentially, the same applies to Frijda’s (2007) tenet
that “emotions—all emotions—involve . . . action readiness”
(p. 26). When Frijda says that the nature of emotions involves
“motive states that I call states of action readiness” (2007), he,
too, is proposing in effect a program of research, targeting not
only the correlations between feelings, thoughts (“appraisals”)
and bodily events and processes, but also the correlations between
feelings, thoughts, bodily events, and processes, and “wants”—
“wants” in general and “wanting to do something” in particular.
The fact that “emotion terms” that we find in the languages
of the world do tend to combine references to feeling and think-
ing with references to wanting (often, wanting to do something)
shows that in common human experience (reflected in lan-
guages), feeling, thinking, wanting, and the body are indeed
inter-related, and so any theory of human “emotional experi-
ence” should indeed pay close attention to all four.
The semantic question “what does the English word emotion
mean” is valid but is probably of limited interest to psycholo-
gists. From a more general (rather than purely semantic) point
of view, the central question is not “what emotions really are,”
but how feelings are related in human lives with thinking and
wanting, and also, with what happens in human bodies (brains,
faces, and much else).
For example, what happened in Gethsemane can be described
(in part) as follows: Jesus was thinking like this for some time:
“I know that something very bad will happen to me in a short
time; I can’t not think like this now: ‘I don’t want it to happen’;
I didn’t know before that it would be like this.” When he was
thinking like this, he felt something very bad because of this, like
someone can feel when they think something like this for some
time. At the same time, something was happening to his body
because of this (heavy drops of sweat, like drops of blood, were
falling to the ground from his forehead). He did something with
his body because he felt like this (he threw himself to the
ground).
What applies to “emotions” in general applies also to specific
categories of emotions. I agree with Lisa Barrett when she argues
against what she calls “the dominant scientific paradigm” based
on the assumption that “traditional emotion categories exist as real
entities in nature, or natural kinds” (2006, p. 22). I am less
inclined to agree, however, when she follows the statement “emo-
tions are not things” with the declaration that “they are states”
(p. 35). Given that the concept of “emotion” is itself a conceptual
artifact of the English language, there is little point in asking
“what emotions really are,” and while calling them “states” is an
improvement on calling them “things,” neither is really justified.
Cross-linguistic evidence shows that speakers of different lan-
guages tend to conceptualize the links between feelings, thoughts,
wants, and bodies in different ways. In English (modern English),
these links are indeed often conceptualized as “states” (and
described by adjectives, e.g., angry), but for example in Russian,
they are typically conceptualized in terms of processes or inner
activities and described by means of verbs (Larina, in press;
Pavlenko 2005; Wierzbicka, 1999, p. 18, 1990).
For example, the closest linguistic and cultural counterpart
of the English adjective angry in Russian is the verb serdit’sja
(roughly, “to voluntarily give oneself to anger and to show it to
other people”). The closest analogue to the Russian model of
emotional experience reflected in verbs like serdit’sja can be
found in archaic English words like to rejoice or in pejorative
ones like to fume, to rage, to fret, or to sulk. Thus, even describ-
ing emotions as “states” appears to be influenced by Anglo
cultural attitudes reflected in modern English. A Russian
psychologist writing in Russian would not describe people’s
cuvstva (roughly, “emotions”) as “states.”
If we want to compare the culturally-shaped conceptualiza-
tion of emotional experience reflected in different languages,
for example, in English and in Russian, we can do so through
prototypical cognitive scenarios, formulated in empirically-
established shared human concepts. Relying on these concepts,
we can also build culture-independent models of human
emotional experience in general.
Evidence coming from the linguistic memoirs of bilingual
and bicultural writers, and also from the testimonies of other
people who live cross-cultural lives, strongly suggests that
there are links between people’s languages and their emotions.
To say this does not mean to deny that, as Pinker (1997) puts
it, “the emotions of all normal members of our species are
played on the same keyboard” (p. 385). Rather, it means that
the keys on the keyboard of our species are not those designat-
ed by English words such as anger, disgust, contempt, and so
on. “Anger” is not a simple key in the keyboard, it is a complex
culture-specific tune. The repertoire of emotional tunes differs
from culture to culture. The real keys of the universal keyboard
are the universal human concepts out of which each culture
can build its own prototypical cognitive scenarios, and its own
culture-specific “appraisals.”
What Are “Subjective Feeling States” and How
Can They Be Explored?
According to Scherer (2000), there is an increasing consensus
in the literature that “subjective feelings states” are an integral
part of what “emotion researchers” mean, or ought to mean, by
“emotions.” It is therefore surprising, in Scherer’s view, that
“the domain of subjective feeling states, which is the central
response component for many emotion theorists, has received
relatively little attention . . . . There have been few attempts to
specify more clearly exactly how subjective feeling states could
be conceptualized” (p.155).
The NSM approach to emotion has from the outset focused on
trying to specify just that, and it has proposed a solution in the
form of prototypical cognitive scenarios formulated in universal
human concepts. For example, one intersubjectively recognizable
“subjective feeling state” can be conceptualized through the
following scenario:
[D] this someone feels something bad,
like someone can feel when they feel something because they
think like this:

“something very good happened to someone else
it didn’t happen to me
this is bad
I want things like this to happen to me”
this someone feels like this because this someone thinks like this
For “free-floating” emotions, a prototypical cognitive scenario
would be similar but it would not include a causal attribution of a
particular feeling to a particular pattern of thoughts (Wierzbicka,
1992b). For example:
[E] this someone feels something bad,
like someone can feel when they feel something because they
think like this:
“something bad can happen to me
I don’t want it to happen
I want to do something because of this
I don’t know what I can do (or: I can’t do anything)”
According to Oatley and Johnson-Laird (1987), the core of
emotional experience is a characteristic phenomenological
tone, different for each “basic emotion” (“Non-propositional
signals have no internal symbolic structure . . . . Like hormones,
they function purely causally” [p. 32]), and since this core is
nonpropositional, it has no analyzable meaning. But while the
feeling itself is indeed “nonpropositional,” it can still be charac-
terized propositionally via a prototype, as shown in the two sce-
narios above. Prototypical cognitive scenarios of this kind
resolve the apparent conflict between the seemingly non-
analyzable (because nonpropositional) character of the feeling
as such and the need to analyze different feelings differently
nonetheless.
Scherer (2000) defines “subjective feeling” as “a reflection
in the central nervous system of all changes in both the central
and peripheral systems during an emotional episode” (p.155).
But surely, any such “reflection in the central nervous system”
would be a corollary of the subjective feeling rather than that
subjective feeling itself. In its present wording, the definition
proposed by Scherer appears to reduce the “subjective” to the
“objective,” that is, the experiential to the physical, rather than
to seek to correlate the two (the phenomenology and the bodily
processes) on equal terms.
Scherer (2000) emphasizes that his own definition of
subjective feeling does not require subjective feeling to be
conscious, and neither does the prototype-based type of
definitions proposed in NSM work and exemplified above
(see in particular [E]). But a fruitful, workable definition
of a subjective feeling state needs to rely on a verbalized
description of a “subjective” (first-person) cognitive scenario,
and not on any “measurement,” as Scherer appears to suggest,
when he says, for example:
Traditionally, subjective feeling state has been measured
exclusively via verbalization . . . . There has been very little
effort to improve on the measurement of this important compo-
nent of the emotion process . . . It remains to be seen to what
extent electroencephalography and neuroimaging methods will
be used as nonverbal measures for subjective feeling. (Scherer,
2000, p.155)
Wierzbicka Language and Metalanguage 11
But human emotional experience cannot be “measured,” it
can only be accessed from the “inside,” through introspection,
and communicated to others through language. As Barrett
(2006, p. 24) put it, “if we want to know whether a person is
experiencing an emotion, we have to ask them.” If one were to
correlate one set of measurable data with another, one would be
leaving out of the picture the most important aspect of emo-
tion—human emotional experience. And yet it is this experi-
ence, not physiological activation or neural events, which is the
foundation of human connectedness and empathy—that empa-
thy which is “one of the bases of social intersubjectivity, value
systems, and morality” (Hoffman, 1982; Lambie & Marcel,
2002, p. 220).
Barrett, Mesquita, et al. (2007, p. 376) quote with approval
Searle’s (2004, p. 52) statement that “the subject-matter of psy-
chology is the human mind,” and rightly insist that “an adequate
account of emotion requires more than a specification of cause;
it also requires a description of content (i.e., of what is felt)”
and that “questions about the material underpinnings of experi-
ence will never reveal the entire story” (p. 377).
This is also the view of the evolutionary psychologist
Donald, who in a chapter entitled “A literary view” argues
that a vast body of evidence about human inner experience,
including emotional experience, can be found in works of
literature:
The best writers have pushed the subjective exploration of the mind
much further than would be permissible in clinical or experimental psy-
chology . . . . Novelists in particular often explore our deepest assump-
tions about awareness. Their portrayals of it constitute a vast, unsystem-
atic collection of phenomena observed from the inside and are possibly
the most authoritative descriptions we have. (Donald, 2001, p.78)
What applies to the best novelists applies also to the best
memoirists and diarists, and especially to bicultural and bilin-
gual writers, who can probe their own emotions without being
locked into a monolingual vision of human experience
(Wierzbicka, 2005). 3
But while it is true that to know what people are experienc-
ing we need to ask them, and that written accounts given by
insightful writers are extremely valuable, it is also true that
asking people and reading written testimonies and imaginary
re-creations of experience is not enough. We also have to try to
draw some general conclusions from the accounts of individual
people, and we need a framework within which a coherent
interpretation consistent with those individual accounts can be
given. We need to be able to move from the subjective to the
intersubjective, and to make our qualitative analysis of subjec-
tive feelings rigorous and systematic. This requires an appropri-
ate semantic methodology.
The scientist’s suspicion of the “subjective” (epitomized
by LeDoux’s [1996, p. 18] comment that “the conscious feel-
ings . . . are red herrings, detours, in the scientific study of emo-
tions”),4 is more understandable when the subjective aspect of
what happens to people is approached exclusively from the
point of view of individual experience and imagination. But the
emotion lexicon of a given language is a gateway to shared
experience, and to shared construals of experience. Such shared
12 Emotion Review Vol. 1 No. 1
construals represent objective social facts which can be brought
into the light of public scrutiny and which can be validated
intersubjectively.
Much depends here, of course, on what exactly one means by
“conscious” and “unconscious.” Scherer (2000, p. 148) com-
ments that “it is debatable whether the denotative and connotative
structure of the emotion lexicon in a particular language will
neatly map the psychophysiological processes that are largely
unconscious.” But while the meanings of emotion words may not
neatly map “psychophysiological processes,” they do reveal facts
of social cognition, that is, shared construals of individual expe-
rience. The fact that these construals are largely unconscious does
not prevent them from being clearly reflected in the semantic
structure of the lexicon. Indeed, as Boas (1911) argued in his
classic introduction to the Handbook of American Indian
Languages, the fact that linguistic meanings typically encapsu-
late unconscious rather than conscious cognitive processes makes
the testimony of those meanings all the more reliable and valu-
able. But at the time, there was no methodology available for
identifying those meanings, and in the case of emotion concepts,
for revealing the exact patterns of appraisal shared by the mem-
bers of a given linguistic community. As NSM researchers see it,
such a methodology is available now.
As Sapir (1924) argued in his classic work on psychology
and culture, a great deal of what we know about our experience
is hidden far beneath the surface of our consciousness. This
knowledge can be retrieved, but only through rigorous analysis
of the meanings which are largely unconscious but which can
be made conscious and open to intersubjective verification. This
has nothing to do with physiological or behavioral measure-
ments, and everything to do with conceptual semantics.
In any case, the distinction between conscious and uncon-
scious appraisals is a crude one. As Donald (2001) points out in
relation to Stendhal, there are many “subtle shades of perception
and thought that operate deep within his characters, within the
scope of awareness, if not always in the spotlight” (p. 83). Donald
speaks also of thoughts which are “at work on the fringes of . . .
awareness” (p. 84), and distinguishes those regions of the mind
which are in principle accessible to the purview of consciousness
from those which lie “permanently and by definition outside the
reach of consciousness” (p. 286). This fits in very well with
prototypical cognitive scenarios of the kind envisaged here.
William James observed that “not all instances that people
call ‘anger’ (or ‘sadness’ or ‘fear’) look alike, feel alike, or have
the same neurophysiological signature” (quoted in Barrett,
Lindquist, et al., 2007, p. 328). However, they all have the
same “conceptual signature” by virtue of being called by the
same word. The statement in Barrett et al. (2007, p. 2) that
“words ground category acquisition and function like concep-
tual glue for the members of a category” echoes John Locke’s
observation that although “it be the mind that makes the collec-
tion [of the different components], it is the name which is as
it were the knot that ties them fast together” (Locke
[1690]/1959, Book III, Chapter 5, p. 10).
This is why to understand human categorization (including
the categorization of emotions) we need to understand, inter
alia, the meaning of words which give human categories their
conceptual unity. But to be able to articulate the meaning of
words, including emotion terms, we need a stable, rigorous, and
culture-independent semantic methodology. The NSM theory
provides such a methodology, and shows through an extensive
body of descriptive work (see the NSM homepage: www.une.
edu.au/bcss/linguistics/nsm/), how this methodology can be
used for explicating the meaning of emotion terms in any natu-
ral language, as well as for analyzing subjective feelings which
are not lexically encoded.
According to Donald (2001, p. 90), “we need a new science
of consciousness that maps out the phenomenology of inner
cognitive spaces in much more detail.” We also need a new sci-
ence of emotion that maps out the phenomenology of “inner
emotional spaces” in much more detail. Developing prototypi-
cal cognitive scenarios formulated in universal human concepts
can be one of the means to this end.
Concluding Remarks
The English writer Tim Parks, who has lived nearly all his adult
life in Italy, and who has thought about these matters deeply and
bilingually, put it well when he said in his novel Destiny:
“Through us the language talks to itself. To explain Italian in
English, for example, is always to have an English explanation
Parks, 2000, p. 69).” To explain human emotions in English—
not in a mini-English coinciding with the shared core of all lan-
guages, but in a full-blown English, in all its culture-specific
richness and idiosyncrasy—is to have an “English” explanation.
If we want to understand universal human emotions we have to
try to understand them through universal human concepts.
In his (1997) book What Emotions Really Are, Paul
Griffiths argued, in defense of Ekman’s theory of “basic emo-
tions,” that Ekman’s terms like “anger” or “sadness” were to
be taken as scientific concepts and should not be expected to
correspond to “pretheoretic” concepts embedded in ordinary
English: “If psychologists cannot induce suitable changes in
the concept of anger they might give their own concept a new
label like “affect program anger,” just as botanists have given
up the term lilies in favour of the family name Liliaceae,
which includes onions, garlic, and much else” (Griffiths,
1997, p. 79).
Unlike the botanist’s Liliaceae, however, words like sadness,
anger and loss are not independent of a particular language
(English) and culture (Anglo). To be valid, “scientific concepts”
of human emotions cannot rely on ethno-classifications such as
those embedded in the English lexicon but must rather be artic-
ulated in terms of language-independent psychological con-
cepts such as the NSM primes THINK, WANT and FEEL.5
To quote Donald (2001) once more,
any given culture is a gigantic cognitive web, defining and constraining
the parameters of memory, knowledge and thought in its members, both
as individuals and as a group. . . . Our cultures are thus . . . our best
friends and worst enemies . . . and even in the most supposedly liberal
of cultures, few of our ideas and experiences can really be called our

own, so thoroughly have they been washed and filtered through the fine
cloth of the culture itself. (p. xiv)
This applies also to Anglo culture entrenched in the English
language.
As the anthropologist Richard Shweder and his colleagues
argue in their recent chapter in The Handbook of Emotions, in
writing about human emotions there is a constant danger of
“assimilating them in misleading ways to an a priori set of lexical
items available in the language of the researcher” (Shweder, Haidt,
Horton, & Joseph, 2008). I agree with Shweder and his colleagues
that this danger can be overcome: “. . . across languages, cultures
and history, it is possible, with sufficient knowledge, effort and
insight, to truly understand the meanings of the other people’s emo-
tions and mental states.” In my view, however, such an understand-
ing can only be achieved when we stop trying to describe other
people’s emotions through English terms such as anger, sadness
and fear (or even through their “scientific” versions such as “affect
program anger,” “affect program sadness” and “affect program
fear”) and try to understand them instead through the conceptual
vocabulary shared by speakers of all languages, that is, through
universal human concepts. As Goddard (2007) puts it:
explicating mental state concepts in terms of semantic primes can artic-
ulate very subtle meaning differences while at the same time freeing the
analyses from terminological ethnocentrism and from the epistemologi-
cal “spin” of English-specific categories. It opens up an “insider perspec-
tive” on the mental state concepts of other languages (as well as our
own), and in the process can help us develop an improved understanding
of how ways of thinking and ways of feeling can be culturally shaped.
The metalanguage of semantic primes allows us to study both
the diversity and the commonalities in human emotions not
only from a cross-linguistic and ethnographic perspective, but
also from a psychological point of view, and, arguably, “opens
up new possibilities for the scientific understanding of subjec-
tivity and psychological experience” (Goddard, 2007).6
As I have argued for many years (e.g., Wierzbicka, 1992a,
1992b, 1995, 1999), treating English emotion terms as valid
analytical tools is a major roadblock in the study of human
emotions. “Loss” is not a universal human concern. “Sadness”
is not a universal human concept. Languages (including
English) shape the emotion categories of their speakers and
carry with them culture-specific emotional scripts. English psy-
chological terms which have no counterparts in other languages
are, to borrow Barrett’s word, “shackles” (Barrett, 2006) from
which scientists must free themselves to be able to step outside
their own culture and explore human emotions from a culture-
independent perspective. Language is a key issue in understand-
ing human emotions and the question of metalanguage is a key
issue in the methodology of emotion research.
Notes
1 In his book Emotions Revealed, Ekman (2004, p.13) dismisses my cri-
tique of his reliance on English emotion words as follows: “This critic
[A. Wierzbicka] presumes that emotions are words, which, of course,
they are not. Words are representations of emotions, not the emotions
themselves.” This is a strange misrepresentation of my position.
Obviously, emotions are not words and it would be absurd to claim that
they were. Words are indeed representations of emotions, not emotions
Wierzbicka Language and Metalanguage 13
themselves. But English words are English representations of emotions,
and as such they embody a particular perspective, a particular linguistic
and cultural slant.
2 Referring to my long-standing critique of his theory of “basic emo-
tions,” Ekman (2004, p. 13) writes that “[Wierzbicka] disparaged our
research in New Guinea because we used stories describing a social sit-
uation instead of single words.” To put the record straight, I must
reiterate that, on the contrary, I regard the use of simple stories in emo-
tion research as valid and helpful. What I object to is, first, the idea that
there is a small set of biologically in-built universal human emotions
(which Russell, 2003, p. 167 ironically calls “the emotional homunculi
of basic emotions”), and second, that these putative universal emotions
just happen to correspond to a set of English words.
3 For a detailed discussion of Tolstoy’s insight into the patterning of emo-
tional experience, with examplification from Anna Karenina, see
Wierzbicka, 1973.
4 When LeDoux (1996, p. 302) declares that “the brain states and
bodily responses are the fundamental facts of an emotion, and the conscious
feelings are the frills that have added icing to the emotional cake,” he is, in
effect, promulgating a program of research limited to “brains states and
bodily responses.”
5 As Goddard (2007, p. 29) notes, “ultimately all data on other
people’s mental states relies on self-reports, and self-reports require
a language. ... When interpreting the self-reports of people whose
native language is not English, if we simply convert their words and
conceptual categories into their assumed English counterparts, we
are in effect “recoding” those reports, and in the process altering
them.” And yet such “recoding” is a routine practice in cross-cultural
psychology.
6 The inherent Anglocentrism of English-based “scientific study of emotions”
parallels that of the English-based “scientific study” of visual semantics (e.g.,
Kay Berlin & Merrifield, 1991), with its reliance on so-called “basic color
terms” identified through English words like red, blue, and green (for discus-
sion see Wierzbicka, 2005, 2008). As the philosopher van Brakel (2004, p. 14)
notes in this context, “The presumption that the human brain is hardwired to
speak English is all-pervasive.”
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