Influence of Culture on Categorical Structure of Emotional Words: Comparison Between Japanese and Korean

Abstract

This study targeted individuals from Korea and Japan to investigate whether their concepts of emotion can be classified as more prototypical (central concepts) and less typical exemplars (peripheral concepts), and how they distinguish them. In Study 1, participants listed examples of “emotion,” and the most frequently reported words were defined as central and others as peripheral concepts. Five central and five peripheral concepts chosen from Study 1 were used in the following four studies, which examined the characteristics of the two conceptual classes and how clearly these are distinguished by Japanese and Koreans. Study 2 identified how strongly the central and peripheral concepts were associated with the word “emotion,” and Study 3 evaluated how good these words were as examples of emotion. In Study 4, the central and peripheral words replaced a word “emotion” in a given sentence and participants assessed how natural the sentence sounded. Study 5 evaluated the fuzziness of the boundary between the central and peripheral concepts. The results of all the studies demonstrated that the concepts of emotion for both Japanese and Koreans are organized based on their typicality. The distinction between the central and peripheral concepts is, however, found to be much more ambiguous for Koreans than for Japanese. The present research revealed that there is a common structure for the concepts of emotion, but it also showed that culturally specific categorization styles as well as language variation can influence how people conceptualize emotion.