Cultural attitudes towards the future shape the semantic structure of emotion concepts

What is the role of culture in how we understand and categorize emotions? This study takes a novel approach to address this long-debated issue by investigating whether specific cultural dimensions influence emotion conceptualization across languages. Native speakers of 15 languages completed a spatial arrangement task, grouping emotion concepts based on perceived semantic similarities. This generated language-specific emotion semantic spaces, which were then compared across languages. Our analysis reveals a strong correlation between semantic space variation and cultural factors, particularly long-term orientation (i.e., societal attitudes towards the future). Crucially, these results are independent of language family and do not strictly follow an East-West cultural divide. This study is the first to directly link specific cultural dimensions to the organization of emotion semantic spaces, providing evidence for the specific mechanisms through which culture shapes emotion conceptualization, and opening new avenues for understanding the complex interplay between culture, language, and emotion.