Word associations or verbal synesthesia between concepts of color and emotions were studied in Gersnany, Mexico, Poland, Russia, and the United States. With emotion words as the between-subjects variable, 661 undergraduates indicated on 6-point scales to what extent anger, envy, fear, and jealousy reminded them of 12 terms of color. In all nations, the colors of anger were black and red, fear was black, and jealousy was red. Cross-cultural differences were (a) Poles connected anger, envy, and jealousy also with purple; (b) Germans associated envy and jealousy with yellow; and (c) Americans associated envy with black, green, and red, but for the Russians it was black, purple, and yellow. The findings suggest that cross-modal associations originate in universal human experiences and in culture-specific variables, such as language, mythology, and literature.
Factor analyses and Procrustes rotations of the responses of 1194 female and 877 male university students in seven countries to a 69-item Likert-type questionnaire revealed cross-cultural commonalities and differences for romantic jealousy and romantic envy. However, when mean ratings of the questionnaire items were categorized as indicating agreement or disagreement with the items, the evidence for cross-cultural invariance of jealousy and envy was less impressive. The stronger cross-cultural invariance found with factor-analytic data was interpreted as evidence that the issues of concern in jealousy and envy situations are similar across nations. The weaker invariance found with the ratings of the items was taken as evidence that events arousing those issues of concern differ across nations.
To determine cross-cultural variations in associative meaning, 389 males and females in Germany, Russia, and the United States rated nouns for their degree of association with the concepts of jealousy, envy, anger, and fear. The findings touched on several issues. Re garding the conceptual distinction between jealousy and envy, the associations overlapped strongly in the United States, somewhat in Germany, and not at all in Russia. In agreement with scholars who posit that jealousy is a combination of anger and fear, we found that jealousy overlapped with anger in three nations and with fear in two nations. But the overlap was far less than that between anger and fear. Evidence for the proposal that anger and fear are more firmly rooted in the biological heritage of human beings than are jealousy and envy was inconclusive. Predictions drawn from tax onomy and prototype models that anger, envy, and jealousy would have similar associations but that each emotion would differ from fear were not supported.
An ongoing debate is centered on the question of whether emotions have their own pattern of autonomic nervous system activation. To determine whether individuals do perceive subjective physiological changes for different emotions, 514 university students in Germany, Mexico, Poland, Russia, and the United States indicated on a 6-point scale to what extent they felt anger, envy, fear, and jealousy in particular parts of the body and body processes. In agreement with recent studies, the pattern of sites where emotions were re ported to be felt varied for different emotions. Cross-cultural commonalities and differences were also found. The findings were
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