In this ground-breaking book, Anna Wierzbicka brings psychological, anthropological and lingusitic insights to bear on our understanding of the way emotions are expressed and experienced in different cultures, languages, and social relations. The expression of emotion in the face, body and modes of speech are all explored and Wierzbicka shows how the bodily expression of emotion varies across cultures and challenges traditional approaches to the study of facial expressions. This book will be invaluable to academics and students of emotion across the social sciences.

Anna Wierzbicka is Professor in the Department of Linguistics at the Australian National University in Canberra. A Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities and of the Academy of Social Sciences of Australia, and a Foreign Member of the Russian Academ of Science, she has lectured extensively in Europe, America and Japan and published twenty books in the fields of linguistics, anthropology and psychology.