Universal Development of Emotion Categories in Natural Language

Copyright 1999 by the American Psychological Association, Inc. 0022-3514/99/S3.00

Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 1999, Vol. 77, No. 2, 247-278

Universal Development of Emotion Categories in Natural Language Ralph B. Hupka, Alison P. Lenton, and Keith A. Hutchison California State University, Long Beach P. Shaver, J. Schwartz, D. Kirson, and C. O'Connor (1987) found that English emotion words fall into 25 categories of synonyms. To find emotion nomenclature universals, the authors used P. Shaver et al.'s taxonomy in a sample of the world's languages and found that emotion categories were added in most languages in a relatively similar generalized sequence. Labeled first were the categories of anger and guilt; followed in Stage 2 by adoration, alarm, amusement, and depression; in Stage 3 by alienation, arousal, and agony; and ending with eagerness in Stage 4. The remaining 5 stages were derivatives of Stages 1—4. Thus, in the folk taxonomy, Stages 1-4 are basic linguistic emotion categories. Motives for labeling emotions were driven possibly by the need to maintain social control, the identification of prototypical emotions elicited in interpersonal relationships, and the need for terms to identify intrapersonal emotions. Features of markedness theory were corroborated for English emotion terms.

with the list created by Murdock (1945), which later was expanded by Tiger and Fox (1971), Hockett (1973), and D. E. Brown (1991). The search for cross-cultural similarities flourished in anthropology, linguistics, and psychology. Universals have been demonstrated in natural language in semantics (Herrmann & Raybeck, 1981; Ullman, 1963); connotative or affective meaning (Osgood, 1964; Osgood, May, & Miron, 1975); phonology, grammar, lexicon, and kinship terminology (Greenberg, 1966); sibling terminology (Kronenfeld, 1974; Nerlove .

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