Human emotions viewed through the Russian language

Levontina, I. B.; Zalizniak, Anna A.

doi:10.1515/9783110880168.291

Cited by 14 publications

(10 citation statements)

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“…In the United States, happiness is primarily conceived as a strongly positive emotional condition (Oishi et al, 2013). In contrast, the Russian word for happiness ( счастье ) expresses more of an existential ideal than a feeling (Levontina & Zalizniak, 2001) and is thought to reflect luck and good fortune as much as one’s own actions or accomplishments (Diener, Kahneman, & Helliwell, 2010; Oishi et al, 2013). The authenticity or truth of emotional expression is considered to be more important than whether these emotions reflect a happy or an unhappy state (Sternin, 2000).…”

Section: Emotion Expression In Russia and The United Statesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Russians Inhibit the Expression of Happiness to Strangers: Testing a Display Rule Model

Sheldon

Titova

Гордеева

et al. 2017

Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology

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Cultural stereotypes and considerable psychological research suggest that Russians are less happy and more stoic than Americans and Westerners. However, a second possibility is simply that cultural norms deter Russians from displaying happiness that they actually feel. To test this second possibility, three studies compared the emotional inhibition tendencies in U.S. and Russian student samples. Although Russians and Americans were no different on subjective well-being (SWB), a consistent 3-way interaction was found such that Russians (compared to Americans) reported greater inhibition of the expression of happiness (versus unhappiness), but mainly to strangers (versus friends/family). Russians also viewed their peers and countrymen as behaving similarly. Furthermore, a consistent interaction was found such that the degree of happiness inhibition with strangers was negatively correlated with SWB in the U.S. samples but was unrelated to SWB in the Russian samples. Given the equivalent levels of SWB observed in these data, we suggest that Russians may not be less happy than Americans, as this would illogically entail that they exaggerate their SWB reports while also claiming to inhibit their expression of happiness. Implications for emotion researchers and international relations are considered.

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Section: Emotion Expression In Russia and The United Statesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Russians Inhibit the Expression of Happiness to Strangers: Testing a Display Rule Model

Sheldon

Titova

Гордеева

et al. 2017

Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology

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“…Malay doesn't 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(Goddard, , 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.…”

Section: Exploring Human Emotions Through Universal Human Conceptsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Language and Metalanguage: Key Issues in Emotion Research

Wierzbicka

2009

Emotion Review

124

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Building on the author's earlier work, this paper argues that language is a key issue in understanding human emotions and that treating 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 psychological experience” (Goddard, 2007).

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“…The majority of the studies focus on emotion words, such as anger , joy , or sadness , that refer directly to particular feelings (Apresjan, 1997; Johnson‐Laird & Oatley, 1989; Levontina & Zalizniak, 2001; Stepanova & Coley, 2002; Wierzbicka, 1999; Zalizniak, Levontina, & Shmelev, 2005). These words are relatively easy to single out and study because they constitute a more or less defined category, or at least a category with clear prototypes.…”

Section: Emotion Vocabulary In Learner Languagementioning

confidence: 99%

“…In what follows, we discuss differences between Russian and English emotion words in four areas: distribution of words across morphosyntactic categories, preferred patterns of emotion coding, syntactic constructions and subcategorization frames, and language‐specific emotion words. Many more differences undoubtedly exist between the two languages, in particular in the areas of semantics, pragmatics, and discourse (cf., Bogdanovich‐Werner, 2005; Levontina & Zalizniak, 2001; Stepanova & Coley, 2002; Wierzbicka, 1992, 1998; Zalizniak et al, 2005). We have, however, limited our discussion to issues informing our research design and analysis.…”

Section: Similarities and Differences Between Russian And English Emomentioning

confidence: 99%

Russian Emotion Vocabulary in American Learners’ Narratives

Pavlenko

Driagina

2007

The Modern Language Journal

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This study compared the uses of emotion vocabulary in narratives elicited from monolingual speakers of Russian and English and advanced American learners of Russian. Monolingual speakers differed significantly in the distribution of emotion terms across morphosyntactic categories: English speakers favored an adjectival pattern of emotion description, and Russian speakers a verbal one. Advanced American learners of Russian shifted from the adjectival to the verbal pattern in Russian and thus began approximating the usage of native speakers of Russian. At the same time, the data revealed 6 areas where learner usage differed from the monolingual Russian corpus: morphosyntactic transfer from the first language (L1), semantic transfer from the L1, greater use of adverbial constructions, absence of a language-specific verb frequently used by native Russian speakers, violations of appropriateness of sociolinguistic register, and a significantly lower proportion of emotion word tokens.

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Human emotions viewed through the Russian language

Cited by 14 publications

References 0 publications

Russians Inhibit the Expression of Happiness to Strangers: Testing a Display Rule Model

Russians Inhibit the Expression of Happiness to Strangers: Testing a Display Rule Model

Language and Metalanguage: Key Issues in Emotion Research

Russian Emotion Vocabulary in American Learners’ Narratives

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