Emotions can seem self-evident, but they come in a lot of varieties which emerge in cultures. It will be a big challenge for AI to understand all of them.
For example, David Konstan, in The Emotions of the Ancient Greeks; Studies in Aristotle and Classical Literature, found that ancient Greek writers described emotions that had no equivalences in modern English. Zelien (from which zealot was derived) was a shared patriotic feeling that spurred soldiers into battle. The intensely communal city-states, which were frequently at war with each other, encouraged the emergence of this feeling. Shame was referred to by several terms, which reflected the nuances of this highly developed feeling in the competitive and communal cities.
Many other cultures have defined emotions that don’t fully translate into English. The Ifaluk in Micronesia have treated fago as one of the most basic emotions, which combines love, compassion, and sadness. It’s oriented to others who are in need. The Ifaluk are tightly circumscribed on a tiny island. All have been born and most will die within its small perimeter, and their close proximity makes people’s suffering visible. Many families are large and extended and adoption is widely practiced, so people have kin throughout the place. High mortality rates for babies and toddlers, sudden epidemics, and regular typhoons make death and mourning regular experiences. The island is flat and only a few feet above sea level, so typhoons sometimes inundate it, wipe out crops, and cause famines. Many people lose their homes at the same time. A high percentage of families are large, and older children are expected to look after younger siblings. They’re thus encouraged to feel fago for little ones. Many types of experiences have thus converged, constructed this kind of feeling, and encouraged people to treat it as basic.
Balinese lek has been roughly translated as shame, but it can also mean shy, respectful, and humble. Greek meraki is used for the deep satisfaction you feel after completing something that expresses who you are. A musician can feel this about a song she just wrote, another person feels it after cooking a dish with a recipe he created, and a short story can inspire a writer to feel meraki after penning it. The Thai feeling kreng jai relates to being considerate and deferential to others to avoid offense or embarrassment. It literally means fearful heart. Thai society is hierarchical and its members are expected to avoid showing extreme or negative emotions, so fear of being confrontational, making someone lose face, or appearing rude is commonly felt. All these words are colored by the whole cultural landscape in which the emotions are experienced.
Emotions have also been found to vary between cultures that are relatively similar to each other. The linguistics professor Anna Wierzbicka noted that the German term angst has no English equivalent—it refers to a vague feeling of danger caused by being unable to predict future events so that there is constant anxiety about harm that one is totally unable to prevent and a feeling that no place is safe. With her Slavic background, she detailed a rich variety of emotional expressions in Polish and Russian, and noted that native speakers of both languages value directly showing emotions and feelings so much that many consider Anglo-Americans cold and mechanical. A Russian woman I knew referred to them as “constipated.”
The Portuguese word saudade expresses the profound nostalgia for a person, event, or place from one’s past that he doesn’t expect to encounter again. Elderly people longing for departed friends and relatives and younger people missing lovers that moved away and married someone else feel saudade.
The psychological anthropologist Janis H. Jenkins wrote that emotional experiences differ across cultures because several factors contribute to their patterns, including notions of the self, how societies define emotions, situations and contexts in which emotions arise, interrelations between different emotions, and how people experience the body. Hazel Rose Markus and Shinobu Kitayama found an enormous number of influences on emotions, including ecological factors, economic factors, child-raising practices, education systems, linguistic conventions, political systems, scripts for everyday behavior, religious settings, daily work, physiological experiences, gestures, and appraisals of emotions. All influence each other and thus make up a highly multidimensional field of meanings which can assume limitless cultural variations.
The anthropologist Andrew Beaty noted that several cultures lack a general word for emotion. He recommends a deep study of personal narratives in order to understand each society’s and situation’s specific patterns.
Even theories that there are some basic universally shared emotions (fear and anger are commonly listed) that are based on innate, uniform, and biological process are being questioned. Paul Ekman studied facial expressions from cultures all over the world and concluded that all people share the same neural programming, which links facial muscles with particular emotions. But research has found cultural differences between people’s inner experiences as they showed the same facial expressions. For example, anger has taken on different varieties. The Ifaluk word song has been translated as anger, but it’s less aggressive and less likely to lead to a destructive act. Instead, people may sulk, pout, refuse to eat, or harm themselves. It doesn’t create as much of an urge to hurt anyone because it’s more passive. The closest Malay word to anger, marah, is also less compatible with violent aggression; it’s closer to the English words upset and resentful. Ifaluk and Malay societies are traditionally more focused on harmonious village life than on the free individual, so anger has often been experienced more in terms of collective well-being.
The word kampung has a lot of depth in traditional Malay culture. It’s generally translated as village, but it means more than a few houses clustered together. It’s integrated with family life, since people in different homes are expected to be hospitable to and polite with each other. They also share religious rituals, means for making a living, and food. Within this comprehensive communal life, anger must be restrained.
Smiles can mean different things in various cultures. Frequent smiles have endeared Thailand to many people, but these gestures don’t always signify happiness. People sometimes display a pleasant expression to show respect for a social superior or to neutralize possible potential tensions. Angry and other abrupt expressions are usually considered extremely rude in Thai culture and people are encouraged to avoid emotional extremes, so a smile often expresses the mixed feelings of tolerating something unpleasant to preserve social harmony.
Anna Wierzbicka wrote that there still might be universals of feeling, but the fact that this is still not agreed on after decades of work to find them strongly suggests that if they do exist, they’re mixed with so many layers of cultural experience that they don’t occur without contexts. Emotions that we feel are convergences of cultural, personal, and bodily experiences which have varied between many places and times. I think AI has a long way to go before it can understand humanity’s richness.