A Cross-Cultural Study of a Circumplex Model of Affect

Abstract

In the quest to understand how people conceptualize emotional feelings, one approach has been to seek the dimensions by which they perceive the similarities and differences among feelings. A circumplex model of affect represents this set of mutual relations by placing feeling-related concepts in a circular order in a space formed by two bipolar dimensions: pleasure-displeasure and arousal-sleepiness. This article offers evidence that the circumplex structure, rather than being somehow dependent on the English-speaking student population in which it was originally obtained, occurs in different languages and cultures. In Study 1, Estonian, Greek, and Polish Ss judged the similarity between feelings described by 28 words in their respective native languages. In Study 2, Greek and Chinese Ss judged the similarity between feelings conveyed by 10 facial expressions. In all cases, multidimensional scaling of pairwise similarity scores yielded the circular order and underlying dimensions predicted by the circumplex.