Shared Knowledge 1 Running head: THE EMOTION LEXICON IN VIETNAMESE AND ENGLISH Shared Knowledge about Emotion among Vietnamese and English Bilingual and Monolingual Speakers

Constructivist theories of emotion must explain recent empirical findings of strong similarity in the structure of emotion space across dissimilar cultures. We believe similarity may emerge from shared cognitive processes and resource constraints operating on a domain named using the superordinate term “emotion. ” Without that term, no coherent domain is formed. Within a category of emotion terms, cultural differences may be revealed best by subordinate terms conveying contextualized information that varies with culture. We compared consensus and the structure of the emotion meaning space for monolingual and bilingual Vietnamese and English speakers in the USA and Saigon, Vietnam. Subjects made triad similarity judgments among 15 emotion terms, replicating previous studies of Chinese and Japanese. Our Vietnamese speakers produced strong differences only for two subordinate-level terms, “shame ” and “anguish.” Bilingual speakers produced judgments more similar to native English when responding in English and more similar to monolingual Vietnamese when responding in Vietnamese, suggesting flexible mapping. The Interpoint Distance Model (developed by Jameson and D’Andrade for color categorization) was applied to explain cross-cultural similarities and differences in emotion categorization and naming