Barbara Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk

Self-Conscious Emotions in Collectivistic and Individualistic Cultures: A Contrastive Linguistic Perspective

The present paper focuses on linguistic and culture-bound aspects of the properties of individualism and collectivism through an English-Polish analysis of the emotions shame and guilt. Combining theoretical analyses with the analysis of authentic data, this work breaks new ground in cognitive-based language analysis in its pragmatic setting and attempts to shed new light on complex issues pertaining to cultural identities. The study presents an investigation on language corpus materials of English and Polish and furthermore it enriches the methodology with questionnaire-based (GRID) data of English and Polish, identifying cross-linguistic similarities and differences between the relevant dimensions and components with respect to shame and guilt. The corpus data used in previous studies show a stronger emphasis on self-construal at the individual level of identity with the Polish users, while the English users were presented to attend to a larger extent to the relational self derived from the interactional relations with others . The present study provides strong additional support for a more refined model of both collectivism and individualism and further elaborates on the assumptions of a contrastive analysis of self-conscious emotions.

Pride in British English and Polish: A Cultural-Linguistic Perspective

The paper focuses on a comparison of cultural emotion models and schemas of pride in British English and Polish. We use the concepts of cultural pride/duma models, which employ pride/duma clusters, and the more schematic pride/duma schemas. Pride/duma and a number of other lexical items from the clusters are instantiations of pride/duma models and schemas. We propose that such models and schemas comprise emotion clusters rather than single emotions. In the present study we include not only British English pride and its widely accepted Polish equivalent duma, but also hubristic pride, which is represented in Polish by proznośc and pycha. While proznośc is most frequently rendered as English vanity, pycha—sharing equivalence space with the more positive duma—can be considered close to English pride in some contexts. All of these meanings are blended with other emotions in the cluster such as contempt, conceit and slight, and immersed in cultural dimensions (e.g., individualism and collectivism, religion), which, together, shape culture-specific models of pride. Three different research methods, the questionnaire-based GRID instrument, online emotions sorting task, and a cognitive analysis of monolingual and translational corpus data, are used to identify cross-linguistic and cross-cultural similarities and differences. Each of these points to different cultural-linguistic schemas of pride/duma in English and Polish, particularly with reference to divergent polarity marking in duma/pride items (more negative in English), while overlaps between Polish and English complex cultural models involve similarities between pride and duma construal in their basic metaphoricity and Source Domains.

Compassion Cluster Expression Features in Affective Robotics from a Cross-Cultural Perspective

The present paper focuses on a comparison between expressive features of principal members of the British English emotion cluster of compassion (empathy, sympathy and compassion) and their prototypical dictionary equivalents in Polish, empatia and wspolczucie. A cross-cultural asymmetry between the English and Polish clusters is argued to increase in the case of the Polish emotion sympatia, which presents a more peripheral correspondence pattern than the more polysemous concept of English sympathy and is shown to belong to a different Emotion Cluster (love/happiness). The expression features of empathy, sympathy and compassion in British English and Polish need to be tuned accordingly in socially interactive robots to enable them to operate successfully in these cultures. The results showed that British English compassion is characterized by more positive valence and more of a desire to act than Polish wspolczucie. Polish empatia, as juxtaposed to British English empathy, which has a wider range of application, presents a less consistent pattern of correspondences. The results further showed that although the processes of emotion recognition and expression in robotics must be tuned to culture-specific emotion models, the more explicit patterns of responsiveness (British English for the compassion model in our case) is also recommended for the transfer to make cognitive and sensory infocommunication more readily interpretable by interacting agents.

Physical and Moral Disgust in Socially Believable Behaving Systems in Different Cultures

The aim of the present study is to use the GRID, online emotions sorting and corpus methodologies to illuminate different types of disgust that an emotion-sensitive socially interacting robot would need to encode and decode in order to competently produce and recognise these and other types of physical, moral and aesthetic types of complex emotions in social settings. We argue that emotions in general, and different types of disgust as an instance of these, differ with respect to the amount of cognitive grounding they need in order to arise and social robots will successfully use such emotions provided they do not only recognise and produce physical, bodily manifestations of emotions, but also have access to large knowledge bases and are able to process situational context clues. The different types of disgust are identified and compared cross-culturally to provide an evaluation of their relative salience. The study also underscores the conceptual viewpoint of emotions as clusters of emotions rather than solitary, individual representations. We argue that such clustering should be at the heart of emotions modelling in social robots. In order to successfully use the emotion of disgust in their interactions with humans, robots need to be sensitive to possible within-culture and cross-culture differences pertaining to such emotions, exemplified by British English and Polish in the present study. Given the centrality of values to the emotion of disgust, robots need to have the capacity to update from a knowledge base and learn from the situational context the set of values for each significant human that they interact with.

Emotional Awareness and the Noticing Hypothesis

The chapter focuses on the place of emotions in human competence and processes which can be identified at the interface of two languages when emotions are experienced and expressed. The primary goal is to present the place and function of emotions in a given culture and to discuss possibilities for non-native speakers of L2 to effectively raise emotional awareness in L2 didactic contexts. The relevance of Schmidt’s (1990) Noticing Hypothesis is emphasized in this context especially as the scope and use of L2 emotion concepts require of the learner a conscious apprehension and awareness of L2 input. The place and position of L1 and L2 materials generated from monolingual and parallel language corpora in enhancement of emotional awareness in FL classroom are exemplified and discussed.