'Happiness' in cross-linguistic & cross-cultural perspective

Daedalus

Volumn 133, Issue 2, 2004, Pages 34-43

  Wierzbicka, Anna ^a  

^a AUSTRALIAN NATIONAL UNIVERSITY   (Australia)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 34347268966     PISSN: 00115266     EISSN: 15486192     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1162/001152604323049370     Document Type: Article

References (29)

1. David G. Myers and Ed Diener, "Who is Hap-py?" Psychological Science (January 1995): 10.
2. Ahdaf Soueif, In the Eye of the Sun (London: Bloomsbury, 1992), 747.
3. David G. Myers, The Pursuit of Happiness (New York: Avon Books, 1992), 25.
4. Myers and Diener, "Who is Happy?" 4.
5. Ronald Inglehart, Culture Shift in Advanced Industrial Society (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1990), 79.
6. See Anna Wierzbicka, Emotions Across Languages and Cultures: Diversity and Universals (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).
7. Inglehart, Culture Shift, 78.
8. Surely, the first hypothesis about the Swiss must be that, unlike their neighbors, they were spared the catastrophe of World War II. Frequently, happiness studies are lacking a historical as well as a linguistic and a cultural dimension.
9. Richard Layard, Happiness: Has Social Science a Clue? Lionel Robbins Memorial Lectures, London School of Economics, March 2003,17.
10. Zhengdao Ye, "Why Are There Two 'Joylike' 'Basic' Emotions in Chinese? Semantic Theory and Empirical Findings," in Love, Hatred and Other Passions: Qitestions and Themes on Emotions in Chinese Civilisation, ed. Paolo Santangelo (Leiden, The Netherlands: E. J. Brill, in press).
11. Cliff Goddard and Anna Wierzbicka, eds., Meaning and Universal Grammar, 2 vols. (Am-sterdam: John Benjamins, 2002)
12. Anna Wierzbicka, Semantics: Primes and Universals (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996).
13. Peter N. Stearns, American Cool: Constructing a Twentieth-Century Emotional Style (New York: New York University Press, 1994).
14. Anna Wierzbicka, "Emotion and Culture: Arguing with Martha Nussbaum," Ethos (in press).
15. Stanisfaw Barańczak, Breathing Under Water and Other East European Essays (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990), 12
16. Daniel Kahneman, "Objective Happiness," in Daniel Kahneman, Ed Diener, and Norbert Schwarz, eds., Welt-Being: The Foundations of Hedonic Psychology (New York: The Russell Sage Foundation, 1999).
17. Layard, Happiness, 19.
18. Myers, The Pursuit of Happiness, 27.
19. Myers, The Pursuit of Happiness, Ibid., 28.
20. Myers and Diener, "Who is Happy?" 12.
21. Eva Hoffman, Lost in Translation (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1989), 78.
22. For discussion, see Mary Besemeres, Translating One's Self: Language and Selflwodin Cross-Cultural Autobiography (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2002).
23. Laura Klos Sokol, Shortcuts to Poland (Warsaw: Wydawnictwo IPS, 1997), 176.
24. Laura Klos Sokol, Shortcuts to Poland, 1997, Ibid., 117.
25. Ed Diener and Eunkook M. Suh, "National Differences in Subjective Weil-Being," in Kahneman, Diener, and Schwarz, eds., Well-Being, 437.
26. Hoffman, Lost in Translation, 271.
27. Stanislaw Barańczak, The Weight of the Body: Selected Poems (Evanston, Ill.: Triquarterly Books, 1989).
28. While I have looked at Anglo-American norms from a Polish perspective, other perspectives yield comparable outcomes. For example, see Eunkook M. Suh, "Self: The Hyphen Between Culture and Subjective Well-Being," in Ed Diener and Eunkook M. Suh, eds., Culture and Subjective Well-Being (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2000).
29. In his contribution to this important recent volume, Suh, a Korean American scholar, notes "dramatic differences between North Americans and East Asians in their levels of SWB [subjective well-being] and positive self-views." He elaborates that "North Americans report significantly higher levels of SWB than East Asians. For instance, compared to 36 percent of Japanese and 49 percent of Korean men, 83 percent of American men and 78 percent of Canadian men reported above neutral levels of life satisfaction in Diener and Diener's study [Ed Diener and Marissa Diener, "Cross-Cultural Correlates of Life Satisfaction and Self-Esteem," Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 68 (1995): 653 - 663]."