The Patterning Instinct: A Cultural History of Humanity's Search for Meaning

by Jeremy Lent

Language can also have a significant effect in channeling emotions. One researcher read the same story to Greek-English bilinguals in one language and, then, months later, in the other. Each time, he interviewed them about their feelings in response to the story. The subjects responded differently to the story depending on its language, and many of these differences could be attributed to specific emotion words available in one language but not the other. The English story elicited a sense of frustration in readers, but there is no Greek word for frustration, and this emotion was absent in responses to the Greek story. The Greek version, however, inspired a sense of stenahoria in several readers, an emotion loosely translated as “sadness/discomfort/suffocation.” When one subject was asked why he hadn't mentioned stenahoria after his English reading of the story, he answered that he cannot feel stenahoria in English, “not just because the word doesn't exist but because that kind of situation would never arise.”16