Human Emotions: Universal or Culture‐Specific?

The search for “fundamental human emotions” has been seriously impeded by the absence of a culture‐independent semantic metalanguage. The author proposes a metalanguage based on a postulated set of universal semantic primitives, and shows how language‐specific meanings of emotion terms can be captured and how rigorous cross‐cultural comparisons of emotion terms can be achieved. 1986 American Anthropological Association