CHAPTER 12
Emotion, Affect, and Mood in Social Judgments
JOSÉ-MIGUEL FERNÁNDEZ-DOLS AND JAMES A. RUSSELL
283QUESTIONS ARISE FROM CULTURAL DIFFERENCES 284
Ontological Realism 284
Nominalism 285
Conceptualism 285
Formalism 285
DIFFERENT RESEARCH PROGRAMS ON EMOTION 285
Emotions as Entities 286
Emotion as Discourse 287
Emotion as Process 288
Formal Definitions for Emotion Terms 289
TOWARD INTEGRATION 290
CORE AFFECT AS A POINT OF DEPARTURE 291
A VOCABULARY FOR A SCIENTIFIC FRAMEWORK
FOR EMOTION 292
THE UNIVERSAL AND THE CULTURAL 294
A COMPARISON OF CORE AFFECT WITH EMOTION 294
REFERENCES 295In everyday conversation, Spaniards occasionally describe
someone as being emocionado(a). To be emocionadomeans
to be emotional, but this translation is misleadingly simple.
Whereas English speakers use the phrases to be emotional
andto have an emotionlargely interchangeably, Spaniards
make a clear distinction between estar emocionadoandsen-
tir una emoción.Emocionadois perhaps better rendered into
American English metaphorically as “to be touched” or “to
be moved” (as a psychological state); emocionadocan be
used in either positive or negative contexts. Spaniards recog-
nize different expressive behaviors for emocionado and
emoción,even when both occur in a positive context. For
example, a Spanish journalist described two medal winners
on an Olympic podium, one smiling and the other crying.
The journalist described the smiling woman as alegre
(joyful) and the crying woman as emocionada(Fernández-
Dols & Ruiz-Belda, 1995). Emocionadois an emotional state
distinct from specific emotions such as anger or joy. In fact,
as early as 1921, Gregorio Marañón, a Spanish doctor,
pointed to Spaniards’ use of emocionadoas a recognition
of the nonspecific nature of visceral changes in emotion
(Ferrandiz, 1984). If emocionadodenotes an emotional state
not recognized clearly in English, Spanish may segment
emotional experience in a subtler way than does English.
Ethnographers’ and historians’ descriptions of remote or
past cultures reveal many more examples of different ways of
talking about emotion. For example, Tahitians lack the word
sadnessentirely (Levy, 1973). Even where a similar word
exists, it may cover different experiences—just as the Eng-
lish word sadnesshas covered different experiences during
different historical periods (Barr-Zisowitz, 2000).
Another observation from the ethnographic record is vast
differences even when an emotion word appears the same.
Consider two societies, both of whom have words easily
translatable as anger. InNever in Anger,Briggs (1970) de-
scribes an Utku family in the Canadian Arctic; the Utku smile
and laugh off situations that would make most of us angry.
They endure with patience and humor situations that would
drive us to fury. The clearest case of an Utku’s anger recorded
by Briggs was particularly telling. A group of visiting
Kapluna (White) sports fishermen borrowed a canoe and
damaged it. It was one of only two canoes the Utku band pos-
sessed. The fishermen later asked to borrow the other canoe.
Damage to this second canoe would endanger the future
livelihood of Briggs’s Utku family. Briggs was the interpreter,
and she refused the fisherman’s request, becoming overtly
angry with them. The Utku elder for whom she was translat-
ing did not react with anger toward the fishermen, who were
to be shown indulgence and forgiven, as a child would be. But
he did react withningaqto Briggs. He found her angry out-
burst so inappropriate that she was ostracized for several
months. The Utku never see anger (ningaq) as justified. The
Utku believe that angry feelings, by themselves, with no
mediation, can harm others or even kill them. For an Utku, to
experience ningaq is to experience oneself as unjustifi-
ably harboring murderous feelings—this in a society in which