Agreement on emotion labels' frequency in eight Spanish linguistic areas

Abstract

Various traditions have investigated the relationship between emotion and language. For the basic emotions view, emotional prototypes are lexically sedimented in language, evidenced in cultural convergence in emotional recognition and expression tasks. For constructionist theories, conceptual knowledge supported by language is at the core of emotions. Understanding emotion words is embedded in various interrelated constructs such as emotional intelligence, emotion knowledge or emotion differentiation, and is related to, but different from, general vocabulary. A clear advantage of Emotion Vocabulary over most emotion-related constructs is that it can be measured objectively. In two successive corpus-based studies, we tested the predictions of concordance and absolute agreement on the frequency of use of a total of 100 Spanish emotion labels in the eight main Spanish-speaking areas: Spain, Mexico-Central America, River Plate, Continental Caribbean, Andean, Antilles, Chilean, and the United States. In both studies, the intraclass correlation coefficient was statistically different from the null and very large, over .95, as was the Kendall's concordance coefficient, indicating broad consensus among the Spanish linguistic areas. From an applied perspective, our results provide supporting evidence for the similarity in frequency, and therefore cross-cultural generalizability regarding familiarity of the 100 emotion labels as item stems or as experimental stimuli without going through a process of additional adaptation. On a broader scope, these results add evidence on the role of language for emotion theories. In this regard, countries and regions compared here share the same Spanish language, but differ in several aspects in history, culture, and socio-economic structure.