Table of Contents

Introduction; Part I. Feelings, Languages and Cultures: 1. Emotions or feelings?; 2. Breaking the 'hermeneutical circle'; 3. 'Experience-near' and 'experience-distant' concepts; 4. Describing feelings through prototypes; 5. 'Emotions': disruptive episodes or vital forces that mould our lives?; 6. Why words matter; 7. Emotion and culture; 8. The Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) as a tool for cross-cultural analysis; 9. An illustration: 'sadness' in English and in Russian; 10. The scope of this book; Part II. Defining Emotion Concepts: Discovering 'Cognitive Scenarios': 1. 'Something good happened' and related concepts; 2. 'Something bad happened' and related concepts; 3. 'Bad things can happen' and related concepts; 4. 'I don't want things like this to happen' and related concepts; 5. Thinking about 'someone else'; 6. Thinking about ourselves; 7. Concluding remarks; Part III. A Case Study of Emotion in Culture: German 'Angst': 1. Angst as a peculiarly German concept; 2. Heidegger's analysis of angst; 3. Angst in the language of psychology; 4. Angst in everyday language; 5. Defining angst; 6. The German angst in a comparative perspective; 7. Luther's influence on the German language; 8. Eschatological anxieties of Luther's times; 9. The meaning of angst in Luther's writings; 10. Martin Luther's inner life and its possible impact on the history of angst; 11. Luther's possible role in the shift from angst 'affliction' to angst 'anxiety/fear'; 12. The great social and economic anxieties of Luther's times; 13. Uncertainty vs certainty, angst vs sicherheit; 14. Certainty and ordnung; 15. Conclusion; Part IV. Reading Human Faces: 1. The human face: a 'mirror' or a 'tool'; 2. From the 'psychology of facial expression' to the 'semantics of facial expression'; 3. 'Social' does not mean 'voluntary'; 4. What kind of 'messages' can a face transmit?; 5. Messages are not 'dimensions'; 6. 'The face alone' or 'the face in context'?; 7. Analyzing facial behaviour into meaningful components; 8. Summing up the assumptions; 9. In what terms should facial behaviour be described?; 10. Humans and primates: a unified framework for verbal, non-verbal, and preverbal communication; 11. The meaning of eyebrows drawn together; 12. The meaning of 'raised eyebrows'; 13. The meaning of the 'wide open eyes' (with immobile eyebrows); 14. The meaning of a turned down mouth; 15. The meaning of tightly pressed lips; 16. Conclusion: the what, the how, and the why in reading human faces; Part V. Russian Emotional Expression: 1. Introduction; 2. Emotion and the body; 3. Conclusion; Part VI. Comparing Emotional Norms across Languages and Cultures: Polish vs Anglo-American: 1. Emotion and culture; 2. The scripts of 'sincerity'; 3. The scripts of interpersonal 'warmth'; 4. The scripts of 'spontaneity'; 5. Conclusion; Part VII. Emotional Universals: 1. 'Emotional universals' - genuine and spurious; 2. A proposed set of 'emotional universals'; 3. Conclusion; Further reading; Index.

Promotional Information

This fascinating book explores the bodily expression of emotion in worldwide and culture-specific contexts.