Anna Wierzbicka
‘Happiness’ in cross-linguistic
& cross-cultural perspective
The psychologists David Myers and Ed
Diener start their frequently cited arti-
cle “Who is Happy” with the observa-
tion that “Books, books and more books
have analyzed human misery. During
its ½rst century, psychology focused far
more on negative emotions, such as de-
pression and anxiety, than on positive
emotions, such as happiness and satis-
faction.” They note with approval that
this is now changing quite dramatically.1
There is of course a good reason why
books, books, and more books have
been written about human misery. Mis-
ery and suffering are part and parcel of
most lives, whereas happiness is not–
or so it has appeared to most people at
Anna Wierzbicka is professor of linguistics at the
Australian National University. Her work spans
anthropology, psicología, cognitive science, phi-
losophy, and religious studies as well as linguistics.
She is the author of numerous books, incluido
“Cross-Cultural Pragmatics” (1991), “Seman-
tics: Primes and Universals” (1996), “Emotions
Across Languages and Cultures: Diversity and
Universals” (1999), and “What Did Jesus Mean?
Explaining the Sermon on the Mount and the
Parables in Simple and Universal Human Con-
cepts” (2001).
most times. In the autobiographical
novel by the Egyptian-born British writ-
er Ahdaf Soueif, the Egyptian aunt of the
Westernized heroine asks her niece why
she left her husband. “We were not hap-
py together,” she replies. The aunt raises
her eyebrows: “Not happy? Is this sane
talk? . . . Who’s happy, niño?”2 This ex-
change is, I think, a characteristic clash
of culturally informed thought patterns,
valores, and expectations.
The ½rst century of psychology, cual,
as Myers and Diener point out, focused
to a far greater extent on negative emo-
tions than on positive ones, was also the
century of, inter alia, the two world
guerras, the Holocaust, the Gulag Archipel-
atrás, the millions deliberately or reckless-
ly starved to death in the Ukraine and
elsewhere under Stalin and in China un-
der Mao Ze Dong, and the horrors of Pol
Pot’s Cambodia. By the end of the twen-
tieth century, Hitler, Stalin, Mao, y
Pol Pot were all gone, but few of those
who watch the evening news on televi-
sion would say that the human condition
has radically changed since the time of
their rule.
1 David G. Myers and Ed Diener, “Who is Hap-
py?” Psychological Science (Enero 1995): 10.
© 2004 por la Academia Americana de las Artes
& Ciencias
2 Ahdaf Soueif, In the Eye of the Sun (Londres:
Bloomsbury, 1992), 747.
34
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Against such a background, the claim
of Myers and Diener that “most people
are reasonably happy, but that some peo-
ple are happier than others” seems rath-
er startling. Most people are reasonably
happy? Who are those reportedly happy
gente?
According to the studies they cite,
North America has the greatest concen-
tration of happy people in the world.
“[I]n national surveys,” writes Myers, “a
third of Americans say that they are very
happy. Only one in ten say ‘not too hap-
py.’ The remainder–the majority–de-
scribe themselves as ‘pretty happy.’”
Europeans, Myers adds, “by and large
report a lower sense of well-being than
North Americans,” but they too “typi-
cally assess themselves positively. Four
in ½ve say they are ‘fairly’ or ‘very’ satis-
½ed with their everyday lives.”3
By Myers and Diener’s account, “na-
tions differ strikingly in happiness, rang-
ing from Portugal, where about 10% de
people say they are very happy, to the
Países Bajos, where about 40% of peo-
ple say the same.” They emphasize that
“nations differ markedly in happiness
even when income differences are con-
trolled for.”4 Is it true that nations differ
in happiness? Or do they differ, bastante,
in what they are prepared to report
about the state of their happiness?
In addressing these questions, politi-
cal scientist Ronald Inglehart is more
cautious than Myers and Diener, in that
he speaks only of differences in reported
happiness rather than in happiness as
semejante. He also seems less willing simply
to take his results at face value. por ejemplo-
amplio, he asks:
But exactly what is it that underlies these
large and rather stable cross-national dif-
3 David G. miers, The Pursuit of Happiness
(Nueva York: Avon Books, 1992), 25.
ferences? Can it be true that Italians,
Francés, Germans, and Greeks really are a
great deal less happy and more dissatis½ed
with their lives than the Danes, Swiss,
Dutch, and Irish? Could fate be so unkind
as to doom entire nationalities to unhap-
piness, simply because they happened to
be born in the wrong place?5
‘Happiness’
in cross-
linguistic
& cross-
cultural
perspectiva
Trying to answer such questions, uno
has to address, at some point, the lin-
guistic problem. Por ejemplo, si 14 por-
cent of Germans declare themselves to
be sehr glücklich whereas 31 por ciento de
Americans declare themselves to be very
happy, can these reports be meaningfully
compared if glücklich does not mean the
same thing as happy?6
Inglehart considers the possibility
that the words used in other languages
to translate the English words happy and
satis½ed may not exactly match, but then
he con½dently dismisses the matter. Su
main argument for dismissing it rests
on the Swiss case: regardless of the lan-
guage they use–whether German,
Francés, or Italian–the Swiss “rank very
highly in life satisfaction” and “express
higher levels of satisfaction than the
Germans, French and Italians with
whom they share a language.” But how-
ever convincing the Swiss case may be,
it is hard to see how it can justify the
sweeping conclusion that Inglehart
draws from it: “These Swiss results
alone devastate any attempt to explain
the cross-national differences as arti-
facts of language.”7
5 Ronald Inglehart, Culture Shift in Advanced
Industrial Society (Princeton, NUEVA JERSEY.: Princeton
Prensa universitaria, 1990), 79.
6 See Anna Wierzbicka, Emotions Across Lan-
guages and Cultures: Diversity and Universals
(Cambridge: Prensa de la Universidad de Cambridge,
1999).
4 Myers and Diener, “Who is Happy?" 4.
7 Inglehart, Culture Shift, 78.
Dædalus Spring 2004
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Anna
Wierzbicka
en
happiness
It is true that the differences in self-
reported bonheur (and its adjective,
heureux) between the French and the
French-speaking Swiss cannot be attrib-
uted directly to any linguistic differ-
ences.8 But surely it doesn’t follow from
this that the differences in self-reporting
between the French and the Americans
couldn’t possibly have anything to do
with the semantic differences between
the French word heureux and the English
word happy.
The glibness with which linguistic dif-
ferences are at times denied in the cur-
rent literature on happiness can be quite
astonishing. The economist Richard
Layard, Por ejemplo, writes, “Of course
one could question whether the word
happy means the same thing in different
idiomas. If it does not, we can learn
nothing by comparing different coun-
tries.” The problem is dismissed as soon
as it is raised; the reader is assured that
“there is direct evidence, for a number
of languages, that the words do have the
same meaning in different languages.”
In support of this claim, Layard re-
ports that “a group of Chinese students
were asked to answer the happiness
pregunta, once in Chinese and once in
Inglés . . . . The students reported almost
exactly the same average level of happi-
ness in both Chinese and English.” In-
stead of inquiring into the possible rea-
sons for such results, Layard concludes
that “since the English and Chinese lan-
guages are very far apart, this ½nding is
highly reassuring,” and that “the con-
cept of happiness seems equally familiar
in all cultures.”9
8 Surely, the ½rst hypothesis about the Swiss
must be that, unlike their neighbors, they were
spared the catastrophe of World War II. fre-
frecuentemente, happiness studies are lacking a histori-
cal as well as a linguistic and a cultural dimen-
sión.
De hecho, the linguist Zhengdao Ye’s de-
tailed study of Chinese positive-emotion
concepts shows clearly that while there
are two happiness-like concepts in the
traditional list of Chinese basic emo-
ciones, both are different from the Eng-
lish happiness. The terms in question are
xi, which Ye de½nes as “festive joy,” and
le, which she de½nes as “attainable en-
joyment/contentment.” Of xi Ye says,
inter alia, that “the positive cognitive
evaluación, the personal character, y
the unexpectedness of the event all con-
tribute to the sudden, intense good
feeling . . . , which is usually outwardly
shown via facial expressions and bodily
gestures.” On the other hand, le “seems
to have a gamut of components from
many ‘happy-like’ words in English. Es
like a hybrid of pleased, enjoyment, estafa-
tented and having fun.” In particular, she
emphasizes the active attitude of le,
which “results in a wish to do something
to keep the current situation going.” Ye
concludes her discussion of the differ-
ences between the ethnotheories of
emotion reflected in Chinese and Eng-
lish as follows:
It seems that in Chinese people’s percep-
tion and conceptualisation of human
emotional experience in relation to good
events there are two quite opposite as-
pects: one is due to a somewhat mysteri-
ous external force, to which the experi-
encer “actively” responds, experiencing
a momentary, intense feeling “stirred”
by external stimuli, and the other is due
to human effort. Each aspect is equally
important and culturally salient, y
each term occupies a place in the small
set of the “basic emotions.”10
a Clue?” Lionel Robbins Memorial Lectures,
London School of Economics, Marzo 2003, 17.
9 Richard Layard, Happiness: Has Social Science
10 Zhengdao Ye, “Why Are There Two ‘Joy-
like’ ‘Basic’ Emotions in Chinese? Semántico
36
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The lack of equivalence between the
Chinese and English words does not
mean that Chinese and Anglo attitudes
toward life cannot be meaningfully com-
pared at all. They can be, but every com-
parison requires a common measure. En
this case such a measure is provided by
the mini-language of simple and univer-
sal human concepts that can be found
in all languages. These simple and uni-
versal concepts include good, bad,
saber, think, want, feel, live, y
½fty or so others. They do not include,
sin embargo, complex culture-speci½c words
like happy, satis½ed, or well-being.11
It is an illusion, entonces, to think that the
English words happy and happiness have
exact semantic equivalents in Chinese,
o, para el caso, in other European
idiomas. The differences, it turns out,
are particularly striking in the case of the
adjective.
In the language of simple and univer-
sal human concepts, the meaning of hap-
piness can be linked with the following
cognitive scenarios: a) some very good
things happened to me; b) I wanted
things like this to happen; and c) I can’t
want anything else now. Por el contrario, el
cognitive scenario of happy can be repre-
sented as follows: a) some good things
happened to me; b) I wanted things like
this to happen; and c) I don’t want any-
thing else now. The main differences
between happiness and happy, entonces, lie in
the contrast between “very good” and
Theory and Empirical Findings,” in Love, Ha-
tred and Other Passions: Questions and Themes
on Emotions in Chinese Civilisation, ed. Paolo
Santangelo (Leiden, Los países bajos: mi. j.
Rodaballo, in press).
11 Cliff Goddard and Anna Wierzbicka, editores.,
Meaning and Universal Grammar, 2 vols. (Am-
sterdam: Juan Benjamín, 2002) and Anna
Wierzbicka, Semántica: Primes and Universals
(Oxford: prensa de la Universidad de Oxford, 1996).
“good” (component a) and between “I
can’t want anything else now” and “I
don’t want anything else now” (compo-
nent c). In happiness one’s heart is ½lled
to overflowing and there seems to be no
room left for any further (unful½lled)
desires or wishes.
Happiness can be compared, apenas,
to the French bonheur, the German Glück,
the Italian felicità, and the Russian sccastie,
because like these words it can be used
to refer to an existential condition seen
as a certain absolute. The adjective hap-
py, sin embargo, does not necessarily imply
a state of happiness. Por ejemplo, if I
say that “I’m happy with the present ar-
rangements,” I do not mean that I either
experience or am in a state of happiness.
De este modo, happy is, por así decirlo, weaker than
happiness, whereas heureux, felice, glücklich,
and sccastlivyj are not similarly weaker
than bonheur, Glück, felicità, and sccastie,
respectivamente.
The semantic differences between hap-
py and its putative counterparts in Euro-
pean languages are often flagged in bilin-
gual dictionaries, which instruct users
not to translate happy as, por ejemplo,
heureux, but to use some weaker word in-
lugar. Here are some examples from the
Collins-Robert English-French Dictionary:
I’ll be quite happy to do it. (cid:1)
Je le ferai volontiers. / Ça ne me derange
pas de le faire. (I’ll gladly do it. / Él
doesn’t bother me to do it.)
I’m happy here reading. (cid:1)
Je suis très bien ici à lire. (I’m very well
here reading.)
I’m not happy about leaving him alone. (cid:1)
Je ne suis pas tranquille de le laisser seul.
(I’m not at ease about leaving him
alone.)
The very fact that happy, en contraste con
those other words, has developed such
‘Happiness’
in cross-
linguistic
& cross-
cultural
perspectiva
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Dædalus Spring 2004
37
Anna
Wierzbicka
en
happiness
a weaker second meaning highlights a
semantic shift that has no doubt con-
tributed to the expansion of the term’s
use in English, at the expense of words
with more intense meanings like rejoice
and joy. Happy–unlike heureux, sccastlivyj,
and glücklich–is not restricted to excep-
tional states (like bliss), but rather is
seen as referring to states within every-
one’s reach. There is nothing excep-
tional about being happy, and this is
why one can be quite happy, reasonably
happy, pretty happy, not at all happy, y
so on.
As I have argued in my book Emotions
Across Languages and Cultures: Diversity
and Universals, the very notion that a per-
son can be pretty happy is, por así decirlo, a
modern invention. At the time when the
adjective happy was close semantically to
the noun happiness, collocations like pret-
ty happy did not exist in the English lan-
guage, and being happy was regarded by
speakers of English as something very
rare, as witnessed, Por ejemplo, by the
following line from George Herbert’s
“Jacula Prudentium”: “There is an hour
where a man might be happy all his like,
could he ½nd it.”
To some extent, happiness can still be
seen as something rare and exclusive,
as can bonheur and felicità. But happy has
drifted away from happiness so far that
it can almost be said to be halfway be-
tween happiness and okay; syntactic
frames such as “I’m happy with the
present arrangements” reflect this se-
mantic weakening. This weakening,
Sucesivamente, can be seen as a manifestation
of an overall process of the dampening
of the emotions–modern Anglo-Ameri-
can culture’s trend against emotional
intensity.12
The remarkable expansion of the
word happy has gone hand in hand with
the decline of negative words like woes,
sorrows, and griefs.13 As I have tried to
show in my Emotions Across Languages
and Cultures, modern English has, entonces
to speak, exorcised woes, sorrows, y
griefs from the fabric of ‘normal’ life. En
older English, woes, sorrows, and griefs (en
the plural) were commonly used to refer
to everyday life, whereas in present-day
Inglés, grief is restricted, en general,
to the exceptional event of the death of a
loved person. At the same time happi-
ness has come to be seen not as some-
thing rare and unusual, but as altogether
ordinary; and the word happy has be-
come one of the most widely used Eng-
lish emotion adjectives–perhaps the
most widely used one of all. According
to the data in the cobuild corpus of
contemporary English, happy is not only
uttered much more frequently than sad
(apenas 3:1) and joyful (apenas 36:1),
but also much more frequently than,
Por ejemplo, heureux is in comparable
French listings (apenas 5:2).
Stanislaw Bara ´nczak, a Polish poet
who emigrated to America, gives a par-
ticularly astute account of the semantic
clash between the English word happy
and its nearest equivalents in some other
European languages–an account based
on his personal experience:
Take the word “happy,” perhaps one of
the most frequently used words in Basic
Americano. It’s easy to open an English-
Polish or English-Russian dictionary and
½nd an equivalent adjective. De hecho, cómo-
alguna vez, it will not be equivalent. The Polish
word for “happy” (and I believe this also
holds for other Slavic languages) tiene
much more restricted meaning; it is gen-
erally reserved for rare states of profound
12 Peter N. Stearns, American Cool: Constructing
a Twentieth-Century Emotional Style (Nueva York:
New York University Press, 1994).
13 Anna Wierzbicka, “Emotion and Culture:
Arguing with Martha Nussbaum,” Ethos (en
prensa).
38
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bliss, or total satisfaction with serious
things such as love, familia, the meaning
de la vida, etcétera. Respectivamente, it is not
used as often as “happy” is in American
common parlance . . . . De paso, es
also interesting that Slavic languages don’t
have an exact equivalent for the verb “to
enjoy.” I don’t mean to say that Americans
are a nation of super½cial, backslapping
enjoyers and happy-makers, as opposed
to our suffering Slavic souls. What I’m try-
ing to point out is only one example of the
semantic incompatibilities which are so
½rmly ingrained in languages and cultures
that they sometimes make mutual com-
munication impossible.14
In the book entitled The Pursuit of Hap-
piness, the American David Myers asks:
“How happy are people?” Given the
widespread assumption that the word
happy can be readily translated without
any change of meaning into other Euro-
pean languages, it is interesting to note
that the question raised in the title of
that chapter cannot be translated into
many other languages at all. One simply
can’t ask in these languages the equiva-
lent of “How happy are people?":
*Comentario (*combien) heureux sont les
gens?
*Come felici sono gli uomini?
*Kak sccastlivy ljudi?
The reason why all of the above sen-
tences are infelicitous is that unlike the
word happy, the words heureux, felice,
and sccastlivyj are not gradable. They all
refer to something absolute, to a peak
experience or condition that is not con-
sidered a matter of degree. To be asked
to measure one’s bonheur or one’s sccastie
on a scale from one to ten is like being
14 Stanislaw Bara ´nczak, Breathing Under Water
and Other East European Essays (Cambridge,
Masa.: Prensa de la Universidad de Harvard, 1990), 12.
asked to measure one’s bliss on such a
escala.
Inglehart, speaking of research into
reported happiness carried out in Europe
and based on the so-called Eurobarome-
ter Survey, has maintained that the ques-
tions adapted from American research–
p.ej., How are things going these days?
Would you say you are very happy, fairly
happy or not too happy?–have “been
found effective in measuring feelings
of happiness [in Europe].” The phrase
“feelings of happiness” is as problematic
here as the idea that such feelings can be
effectively measured.
Using French and Russian again as ex-
amples, I will note that bonheur and sccas-
tie suggest, roughly speaking, an existen-
tial condition rather than a momentary
feeling, and that the phrase “feelings of
happiness” cannot be translated literally
into French or Russian (*les sentiments de
bonheur; *ccuvstva sccastia). De paso,
for this reason, the economist Daniel
Kahneman’s idea that happiness can
be studied more effectively by focusing
people’s attention on the subjective
quality of their current circumstances,
rather than on any overall assessment
of their lives, may be more applicable to
English than to other languages.15 For
ejemplo, in French, momentary good
feelings occurring in the course of an
ordinary day would normally be linked
with plaisir (pleasure) rather than with
bonheur; and in Russian, they would be
linked with udovol’stvie (apenas, plea-
sure) rather than with sccastie.
In happiness studies, it is often as-
sumed that people’s subjective well-
being can be reliably estimated on the
15 Daniel Kahneman, “Objective Happiness,"
in Daniel Kahneman, Ed Diener, and Norbert
Schwarz, editores., Well-Being: The Foundations of He-
donic Psychology (Nueva York: The Russell Sage
Base, 1999).
‘Happiness’
in cross-
linguistic
& cross-
cultural
perspectiva
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Dædalus Spring 2004
39
Anna
Wierzbicka
en
happiness
basis of their self-reports. Doubts about
the reliability of such reports are some-
times acknowledged, but they tend to
be minimized.
Por ejemplo, Layard, having dismissed
the question “whether the word ‘happy’
means the same in different languages,"
writes, “But again, might not people in
some countries feel more impelled to re-
port high or low levels of happiness, ser-
cause of local cultural norms? There is
no evidence of this–for example no
clear tendency for individualistic coun-
tries to report high or collectivist cul-
tures to report low.”16
Strikingly, the reliability of the clas-
si½cation of countries as either individu-
alist or collectivist is taken for granted
aquí, and since there emerges no clear
correlation between individualism (como
measured by such classi½cations) y
self-reported happiness, es asumido
that self-reports can reliably measure
the actual well-being of people across
languages and cultures.
Myers strikes a more cautious note
about self-reports, but his caution does
not include any cross-cultural perspec-
tivo. He begins by stating that everyone
is the best judge of his or her own happi-
ness: “if you can’t tell someone whether
you’re happy or miserable, who can?"
He continues as follows: “Still, even if
people are the best judges of their own
experiencias, can we trust them to be
candid? People’s self-reports are suscep-
tible to two biases that limit, but do not
eliminate, their authenticity.”17 One of
the biases, according to Myers, has to do
with people’s momentary moods: “By
coloring people’s assessments of the
overall quality of their lives, temporary
moods do reduce the reliability of their
self-pronouncements. Their happiness
thermometers are admittedly imper-
fect.” The other bias is people’s “ten-
dency to be agreeable, to put on a good
face.” People, Myers says, “overreport
good things”–they “are all a bit Polly-
annish.” However, “this poses no real
problem for research,” because “we
could downplay people’s happiness
reports by, decir, 20 percent and still as-
sume that our ‘happiness thermometers’
are valid as relative scales.”18
I do not wish to question Myers’s as-
sumption or conclusions as far as the
subjective well-being of Americans is
concerned. One should be careful, cómo-
alguna vez, to distinguish between all Ameri-
cans and all people. It may indeed be
reasonable to assume that our “happi-
ness thermometers” are valid as relative
scales–if one is comparing individuals
who speak the same language and share,
or are familiar with, the same cultural
normas. When it comes to cross-cultural
comparisons, sin embargo, the situation is
very different.
De este modo, when Myers and Diener state
that “nations differ strikingly in happi-
ness, ranging from Portugal, dónde
acerca de 10% of people say they are very
happy, to the Netherlands, where about
40% of people say the same,” a move is
hecho, imperceptibly, from differences in
self-reports to differences in actual well-
ser. De hecho, Myers and Diener them-
selves acknowledge that in some soci-
eties “norms more strongly support ex-
periencing and expressing positive emo-
tions.”19 But if so, then how can cross-
national and cross-cultural differences
in self-reports be equated with differ-
ences in happiness?
Somewhat disconcertingly, Myers and
Diener state that “collectivist cultures
report lower swb [subjective well-
16 Layard, Happiness, 19.
18 Ibídem., 28.
17 miers, The Pursuit of Happiness, 27.
19 Myers and Diener, “Who is Happy?" 12.
40
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ser] than do individualist cultures,"
whereas Layard claims, as we have seen,
that there is no clear difference in this
regard between so-called individualist
and collectivist countries. Even more
disconcerting, sin embargo, is Layard’s con-
½dent rejection of the possibility that
“people in some countries [might] feel
more impelled to report high or low lev-
els of happiness because of local cultural
norms.”
There is plenty of evidence that local
cultural norms do produce different atti-
tudes to expressing happiness or, más
generally, good feelings. Evidence of this
kind cannot be elicited through surveys
based on self-reports; it can, sin embargo, ser
gained by other methods. En particular,
there is a growing body of evidence
emerging from cross-cultural autobiog-
raphies, and there is extensive linguistic
evidencia.
In her memoir Lost in Translation: Life
in a New Country, the Polish-born writer
Eva Hoffman, who emigrated with her
parents to North America at the age of
thirteen, contrasts two cultural scripts
by describing two different rituals of
farewell, as experienced ½rst in Poland
y luego, two years later, in America:
But as the time of our departure approach-
es, Basia . . . makes me promise that I won’t
forget her. Of course I won’t! She passes
a journal with a pretty, embroidered cloth
cover to my fellow classmates, en el cual
they are to write appropriate words of
good-bye. Most of them choose melan-
choly verses in which life is ½gured as a
vale of tears or a river of suffering, o un
journey of pain on which we are embark-
En g. This tone of sadness is something we
all enjoy. It makes us feel the gravity of
vida, and it is gratifying to have a truly trag-
ic event–a parting forever–to give vent
to such romantic feelings.
It’s only two years later that I go on a
month-long bus trip across Canada and
the United States with a group of teenag-
ers, who at parting inscribe sentences in
each other’s notebooks to be remembered
por. “It was great fun knowing you!” they
exclaim in the pages of my little notebook.
“Don’t ever lose your friendly personali-
ty!” “Keep cheerful, and nothing can
harm you!” they enjoin, and as I com-
pare my two sets of mementos, Sé
eso, even though they’re so close to each
other in time, I’ve indeed come to another
country.20
A similar autobiographical account of a
clash between Polish and American cul-
tural scripts comes from Laura Klos So-
kol, an American woman who married a
Pole and settled with him in Warsaw:
To some extent, Poles enjoy the upbeat
American pom-pom skating cheer. Who
would dare claim that cheerfulness is bad?
Sin embargo, sometimes Poles balk at Ameri-
can-style frothy enthusiasm. Ask a Pole to
imitate American behavior and chances
are the result will include a wide smile, un
elongated “Wooooow!” and “Everything
is ½ne!” with a thumbs-up.
One Pole said, “My ½rst impression
was how happy Americans must be.”
But like many Poles she cracked the code:
“Poles have different expectations. Alguno-
thing ‘fantastic’ for Americans would not
be ‘fantastic’ in my way of thinking.” An-
other Pole says, “When Americans say
it was great, I know it was good. Cuando
they say it was good, I know it was okay.
When they say it was okay, I know it was
bad.”21
20 Eva Hoffman, Lost in Translation (Nueva York:
mi. PAG. Dutton, 1989), 78. For discussion, see Mary
Besemeres, Translating One’s Self: Language and
Selfhood in Cross-Cultural Autobiography (Ox-
ford: Peter Lang, 2002).
21 Laura Klos Sokol, Shortcuts to Poland (Guerra-
saw: Wydawnictwo ips, 1997), 176.
‘Happiness’
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& cross-
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Dædalus Spring 2004
41
Anna
Wierzbicka
en
happiness
Looking at her native American culture
from a newly acquired Polish point of
vista, Klos Sokol satirizes: “Wow!
Excelente! How nice! That’s fantastic! Yo tenía
a terri½c time! It was wonderful! Have a
nice day! Americans. So damned cheer-
ful.”
In addition to verbal routines like
those mentioned above, and to the fre-
quent use of untranslatable key cultural
words like fun and enjoy, the differences
between the two sets of cultural scripts
are also reflected in nonverbal commu-
nication, particularly in smiling:
A Pole who lived in the States for six years
recently returned to Poland for a visit.
During a round of introductions to some
people in a café, she immediately spotted
the American by his smile. “There’s a lack
of smiling here . . .” says the Pole. Otro
Pole says, “Americans, en general, smile all
el tiempo. Aquí, people in the streets look
worried.”22
Noting that “Americans smile more in
situations where Poles tend not to,” Klos
Sokol observes: “In American culture,
you don’t advertise your daily head-
aches; it’s bad form; so you turn up the
corners of the mouth–or at least try–
according to the Smile Code.”
Observations of this kind cast doubt
on the validity of statements like the fol-
mugiendo: “When self-reports of well-
being are correlated with other methods
of measurement, they show adequate
convergent validity. They covary . . .
with the amount of smiling in an inter-
view.”23 Statements of this kind don’t
take into account that the amount of
smiling, también, is governed to some extent
22 Ibídem., 117.
23 Ed Diener and Eunkook M. Suh, “National
Differences in Subjective Well-Being,” in
kahneman, Diener, and Schwarz, editores., Well-
Being, 437.
by cultural norms, and that the norms
for smiling are closely related to the
norms for verbal behavior (incluido
verbal self-reports).
From the perspective of immigrant
writers it seems clear that Anglo-Ameri-
can culture fosters and encourages
cheerfulness, positive thinking, y
staying in control. To quote Eva Hoff-
man’s memoir again:
If all neurosis is a form of repression, entonces
surely, the denial of suffering, and of help-
lessness, is also a form of neurosis. Surely,
all our attempts to escape sorrow twist
themselves into the speci½c, acrid pain of
self-suppression. And if that is so, then a
culture that insists on cheerfulness and
staying in control is a culture that–in one
of those ironies that prevails in the unruly
realm of the inner life–propagates its
own kind of pain.24
Such assessments of the psychological
costs of “obligatory” cheerfulness may
or may not be correct, but few commen-
tators would disagree with the basic idea
that something like cheerfulness is en-
couraged by American culture.
Let me adduce here one more autobio-
graphical testimony to the perceived dif-
ferences between Polish and Anglo-
American cultural scripts concerning
happiness and good feelings–a frag-
ment of Stanislaw Bara ´nczak’s poem
“Small talk” (translated from the Polish
by the poet):
How Are You, I’m Just Fine; who says
there is no chance
for any conversation between us, who says
there’s no communication between the
grey stone wall,
or the trembling of a window frame, o
the rainbow-hued oil
spilled on the asphalt, and myself; how on
earth could
24 Hoffman, Lost in Translation, 271.
42
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my dialogue with them be a lie, how could
En conclusión, progress in cross-cul-
it be mute,
this talk between the hydrant, fog, stairs,
bough, screech of tires
and me, whom they approach–on every
camino, in every passing
always the same and invariably friendly
inquiry,
What’s The News, Everything’s ok.25
For immigrants like Bara ´nczak, Eng-
lish conversational routines like “How
are you, I’m just ½ne” constitute barriers
to genuine heart-to-heart communica-
tion–and, as we have seen earlier, entonces
does the wide use of the word happy.
Desde esta perspectiva, the tendency of
Americans to declare themselves as hap-
py in the surveys that aim to assess their
subjective well-being must be seen as
vinculado, hasta cierto punto, with the same
norms that encourage the social smile,
the cheerfulness, the use of Great! y entonces
on.26
25 Stanislaw Bara ´nczak, The Weight of the Body:
Selected Poems (Evanston, Ill.: Triquarterly
Books, 1989).
26 While I have looked at Anglo-American
norms from a Polish perspective, other per-
spectives yield comparable outcomes. por ejemplo-
amplio, see Eunkook M. Suh, “Self: The Hyphen
Between Culture and Subjective Well-Being,” in
Ed Diener and Eunkook M. Suh, editores., Cultura
and Subjective Well-Being (Cambridge, Masa.:
con prensa, 2000). In his contribution to this
important recent volume, Suh, a Korean Amer-
ican scholar, notes “dramatic differences be-
tween North Americans and East Asians in
their levels of swb [subjective well-being] y
positive self-views.” He elaborates that “North
Americans report signi½cantly higher levels of
swb than East Asians. Por ejemplo, comparado
a 36 percent of Japanese and 49 por ciento de
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]."
tural investigations of happiness and
subjective well-being requires a greater
linguistic and cross-cultural sophistica-
tion than that evident in much of the
existing literature on the subject. A
compare meanings across languages
one needs a well-founded semantic
metalanguage; and to be able to inter-
pret self-reports across cultures one
needs a methodology for exploring cul-
tural norms that may guide the inter-
viewees in their responses. I believe that
the natural semantic metalanguage,
based on universal human concepts,
can solve the ½rst problem and that
the methodology of cultural scripts can
solve the second–and that together they
can bring signi½cant advances to the in-
triguing and controversial ½eld of happi-
ness studies.
‘Happiness’
in cross-
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& cross-
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