Cross-cultural comparison of fear, sadness and anger: British English versus Polish

Abstract

A major novel focus of our investigation was to employ three complementary methodological paradigms—GRID, online emotions sorting and corpus linguistics—to investigate previous findings that sadness was rated higher than its Polish equivalent, smutek , on the

and dimensions (Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk & Wilson, 2024) and that fear was rated higher than its Polish equivalent, strach , on the dimension (Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk, Wilson & Niiya, 2013). Convergent evidence from all three methodologies supported hypothesis two, showing that smutek and strach are conceptualised as having greater conceptual proximity than their British English equivalents, sadness and fear . The salience of sadness in Polish culture suggests that the relatively lower of strach may reflect the low associated with smutek . Corpus findings also revealed a strong association between British English fear and anger , suggesting that the high of anger may contribute to the salience of high in fear . Online emotions data showing stronger co-occurrences between sadness and British English -cluster concepts than between smutek and Polish -cluster concepts support hypothesis three. However, hypothesis one was not supported: British English anger was not rated higher than Polish złość ‘anger 1’ and gniew ‘anger 2’ on and .