Japanese emotion concepts
Chapter 3 endnote 23, from How Emotions are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain by Lisa Feldman Barrett.
Some context is:
Not all cultures understand emotions as internal mental states. Himba and Hadza emotion concepts, for example, appear to be more focused on actions. This is also true of certain Japanese emotion concepts.
For example, the Japanese concept amae.
Emotion concepts that focus on action, instead of feeling, are associated with what scientists call "opacity of mind."[1][2] An emotion doesn't tell you what someone is thinking or feeling but instead what they are likely to do next in the present situation. Many languages characterize emotions as action sequences arising between people, rather than as personal, physiological events triggered within the skin of one person.[3]
Notes on the Notes
- ↑ Barrett, H. Clark, Alexander Bolyanatz, Alyssa N. Crittenden, Daniel MT Fessler, Simon Fitzpatrick, Michael Gurven, Joseph Henrich et al. 2016. "Small-scale societies exhibit fundamental variation in the role of intentions in moral judgment." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 113 (17): 4688-4693.
- ↑ Robbins, Joel, and Alan Rumsey. 2008. "Introduction: Cultural and linguistic anthropology and the opacity of other minds." Anthropological Quarterly 81 (2): 407-420.
- ↑ Pavlenko, Aneta. 2014. The Bilingual Mind: And What it Tells Us About Language and Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.