Abstract
Discussions about emotion—whether by anthropologists, psychologists, or linguists—often concern differences among types of emotions. At issue are questions such as: How to characterize happiness versus sadness versus anger; how to distinguish such basic emotions from more complex, derived ones like guilt or schadenfreude; whether Tahitians ever experience something like guilt or Americans ever experience the apparently commonplace Japanese emotion of amae; whether emotion categories are natural kinds or social constructions? An assumption underlying many, if not all, of these discussions is that emotions, generically, refer to a person’s internal experiential feelings, whatever their specific stripe. According to this presupposition, emotions are internal, mental, psychological states; call this a mentalistic construal of emotion. A mentalistic construal of emotion is common in scientific discussion and is also obvious in the everyday emotion conception of Western European and North American cultures and languages. Indeed, the common scientific assumption no doubt reflects this everyday construal. An intriguing question for this volume, therefore, focused as it is on everyday emotion understanding across a variety of different languages and cultures, concerns this generic characterization: Do all cultures conceive of persons as having internal emotional experiences? Do all folk recognize the existence of some such psychological states, regardless of the specific emotion categories they do and do not honor?
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Wellman, H.M. (1995). Young Children’s Conception of Mind and Emotion. In: Russell, J.A., Fernández-Dols, JM., Manstead, A.S.R., Wellenkamp, J.C. (eds) Everyday Conceptions of Emotion. NATO ASI Series, vol 81. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-8484-5_17
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