Communication is universal. Regardless of what language you speak, humans aim to communicate with one another in order to achieve common goals. Despite this need to communicate common to all people, does emotional expression in languages differ? How people communicate varies from culture to culture. Can culture itself impact emotional expression and communication, something so universal?
Looking at multi-language speakers, it appears to be the case. In emotionally heated moments, bilinguals tend to switch back and forth between languages, depending on which one can more appropriately express their feelings at the time. For children of bilingual parents, this code switching becomes valuable. The children learn to verbalize their feelings due to the wider variety of emotional expression in the language and label them appropriately.
Speaking and body language generally go hand-in-hand for expressing emotion. While some forms of body communication may be considered universal, display rules vary from culture to culture. For example, in one study [PDF], Americans and Japanese individuals watched a stressful film and both American and Japanese participants reacted with disgusted facial expressions. When watching the film with an experimenter, though, Japanese individuals smiled, hiding their disgust while Americans continued to show distressed facial expressions. This difference in cultural display rules effects what forms of emotional expression in a given language are acceptable. Due to cultural norms, certain emotions may be difficult for a person to express in front of others, both through body language and by speaking.
Some words cannot be directly translated into another language. Likewise, words for certain emotions exist in other languages that have no direct meaning in English. Does this mean that an English speaker cannot feel these emotions if there are no words that exist to express it? Perhaps not, as often times people experience an emotion but are at a loss as to how to describe their feelings. On such occasions, emotional expression becomes difficult. Different languages have their own features of expression. In another language, a word may exist that perfectly describes the emotion a person is currently experiencing and that person may not even realize it.
Some words and emotions cannot be directly translated into another language, but that does not necessarily mean people of different languages do not experience these emotions, they simply cannot express them. Speaking more than one language provides some assistance in expressing emotions with language, since a speaker of more than one language has more vocabulary to express a specific feeling. Culture also plays a role in the ability to express emotions. If it is not acceptable for a person to display a certain emotion in public, communicating this feeling to others becomes more difficult.
Have you ever experienced an emotion that you could not express in your native language? Have you found it difficult to explain how you feel if words don’t exist to describe the emotion?
