Comparison of Associative Meaning of the Concepts of Anger, Envy, Fear, Romantic Jealousy, and Sadness Between English and Korean

Abstract

With emotion terms as a between-participants variable, 304 American and Korean undergraduates free associated in writing for 1 minute to either anger, envy, fear, jealousy, or sadness. In favor of the concept of language universals but in opposition to the tenet of postmodernism that emotion concepts are language and culture specific, a third of the associations were identical in the two languages, with differences centered on what aspect of the emotion guided the associations: identification of synonyms, consequences, correlates, or elicitors of the emotions. The association overlap between envy and jealousy was similar for Americans and Koreans. Contrary to prototype theory, the jealousy associations did not overlap more with the anger, fear, and sadness associations than the overlaps among the latter emotion terms.