Shared Knowledge About Emotion Among Vietnamese and English Bilingual and Monolingual Speakers

Recent empirical findings show strong similarity in the structure of emotion space across highly diverse cultures. Previous researchers believe this demonstrates shared conceptual understanding of emotion. However, similarity may emerge from sources such as similar language structure operated upon by pan-human categorization processes. Thus, existence of a superordinate concept of emotion may be prerequisite to similar categorization of emotion terms. Within a broader emotion category, cultural differences may be strongest for subordinate terms that convey contextualized information. To explore this, the authors replicated studies of Chinese and Japanese, comparing emotion term similarity judgments for monolingual and bilingual Vietnamese and English speakers in the United States and Saigon, Vietnam. Participants showed strong consensus about meanings of 15 emotion terms, with differences for two subordinate-level terms, “shame” and “anguish.” Judgments for bilingual participants mirrored those of monolinguals in each language, indicating code switching. The Interpoint Distance Model was applied to interpret the results.