Cristina Soriano researches how people describe feelings across different languages and cultures:
[W]e use a questionnaire and ask people around the world about the meaning of their emotion words. Questions are made about the various “components of emotion”, that is, the basic aspects of experience commonly believed to compose an emotional episode. These include, among others, the way we perceive events around us (was this intentional? is it controllable?), the way our body reacts (e.g. increased heart rate, shivers, blushing), or the way we express our feelings (e.g. frowning, smiling, crying). The responses allow us to compose a mean semantic profile for those words that we can then compare across languages and countries. So far we have investigated the meaning of 24 emotion terms in 23 languages and 27 countries.
She has found a lot of overlap, but the differences are fascinating:
For example, Spanish “despair” (“desesperación”) designates a more excited emotion than English “despair.” The latter means, for instance, that when I say I feel “despair,” I may be clenching my teeth and pulling my hair out. By contrast, when my husband says he feels “despair,” he is more likely to have bowed his head and covered his face with his hands.
Interestingly, differences can also be found between countries that speak the same language. For example, the meaning of French “serenité” (serenity) seems to be more positive in Canada than Gabon, and indeed the facial expression of “serenité” in Canada has been found to include a smile, whereas in the African country, “serenity” has more of a neutral face.
The Dish 