This volume aims to enrich the current interdisciplinary theoretical discussion of human emotions by presenting studies based on extensive linguistic data from a wide range of languages of the world. Each language-specific study gives detailed semantic descriptions of the meanings of culturally salient emotion words and expressions, offering fascinating insights into people's emotional lives in diverse cultures including Amharic, Chinese, German, Japanese, Lao, Malay, Mbula, Polish and Russian. The book is unique in its emphasis on empirical language data, analysed in a framework free of ethnocentrism and not dependent upon English emotion terms, but relying instead on independently established conceptual universals. Students of languages and cultures, psychology and cognition will find this volume a rich resource of description and analysis of emotional meanings in cultural context.FROM THE CONTENTSJean Harkins and Anna Wierzbicka: IntroductionMengistu Amberber: Testing emotional universals in AmharicRobert D. Bugenhagen: Emotions and the nature of persons in MbulaUwe Durst: Why Germans don't feel "anger"N. J. Enfield: Linguistic evidence for a Lao perspective on facial expression of emotionCliff Goddard: 'Hati': a key word in the Malay vocabulary of emotionJean Harkins: Talking about anger in Central AustraliaRie Hasada: Meanings of Japanese sound-symbolic emotion wordsPawel Kornacki: Concepts of anger in ChineseI. B. Levontina and Anna A. Zalizniak: Human emotions viewed through theRussian languageAnna Wierzbicka: A culturally salient Polish emotion: 'przykro'Zhengdao Ye: An inquiry into "sadness" in Chinese.Subject and name indexWords and phrases index