Chinese emotions: words, meaning and culture

Students of Chinese emotions have observed that there is a rich vocabulary in Chinese for describing feelings and emotions, and that many emotion words and concepts lack their equivalents in English or other languages. How to overcome the untranslatability challenge? This chapter illustrates, with emotion words from Mandarin Chinese and Shanghai Wu, how Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) provides a valuable methodological tool for revealing the culture-specific ways of thinking and feelings, and for articulating cultural norms for emotion expression. The chapter also discusses how the NSM approach to emotion studies intersects with Chinese indigenous psychology, psychological anthropology, and Sinology.