In Everyday Conceptions of Emotion, prominent anthropologists, linguists and psychologists come together for the first time to discuss how emotions are conceptualised by people of different cultures and ages, speaking different languages. Anger, fear, jealousy and emotion itself are concepts that are bound up with the English language, embedded in a way of thinking, acting and speaking. At the same time, the metaphors underlying such concepts are often similar across languages, and children of different cultures follow common developmental pathways. The book thus discusses the interplay of social and cultural factors that humans share in their development of an understanding of the affective side of their lives.
For researchers interested in emotion, development of concepts and language, cultural and linguistic influences on psychological processes.

Section 1: Emotion Concepts and What Language Reveals About Them.- Introduction: Language and emotion concepts.- Everyday conceptions of emotion: A semantic perspective.- Metaphor and the folk understanding of anger.- The heart and the head: Everyday conceptions of being emotional.- Prototype analyses of emotion terms in Palau, Micronesia.- Turkish emotion concepts: A prototype analysis.- Emotions and emotion words.- Everyday concepts of emotions following every-other-day errors in joint plans.- Section 2: Anthropological Studies of Emotion Concepts.- Introduction: Ethnotheories of Emotion.- American cultural models of embarrassment: The not-so egocentric self laid bare.- The study of Inuit emotions: Lessons from a personal retrospective.- The politics of emotion in Nukulaelae gossip.- "Caught in the web of words:" Performing theory in a Fiji Indian community.- A sociolinguistic apporach to emotion concepts in a Senegalese community.- Everyday conceptions of distress: A case study from Toraja, Indonesia.- Section 3: The Developing Child's Theory of Emotion.- Introduction: The Child's Concept of Emotion.- Young Children's Conception of Mind and Emotion: Evidence from English Speakers.- Children's Understanding of Emotion.- The Development of Children's Understanding of Negative Reflexive Social Emotions.- Developmental Constraints of Emotion Categories.- Children's Understanding of the Strategic Control of Negative Emotions.- Intersubjective Emotions and the Theory of Mind Research: A Cultural Critique.- Section 4: Social Influences on Conceptions of Emotion.- Introduction: Social Psychological Perspectives on Laypersons' Theories of Emotion.- Culture Differences in Emotional Knowledge: A Study in Mexico, Chile, Belgium and the Basque Country (Spain).-Naive Theories of Emotional Experience: Jealousy.- Emotion Concepts as a Function of Gender.- The Social Sharing of Emotion as a Source for the Social Knowledge of Emotion.- Knowing and Labeling Emotions: The Role of Social Sharing.- Expression of Emotion Versus Expressions of Emotions: Everyday Conceptions about Spontaneous Facial Behavior.- The Collective Construction of Self Esteem: Implications for Culture, Self, and Emotion.- Section 5: Concluding Comments.- Final Session.- The Appeal and Pitfalls of Cross-Disciplinary Dialogues.- Afterword.