Bai's results showed significant differences in the perception of shame expression across participant groups, although it is unclear whether the observed variation patterns may be generalized to the perception of other emotions.
You can wear long trousers, short skirts, extra long sleeves, super tight tops and pants that reveal a third of your underwear and scratchy fabrics and still be regular, obviously, but other people won't think you're regular unless you are completely comfortable in these clothes and don't have a pained, shamed or uncomfortable expression on your face!
For example, both Li et al. (2004) and Bai (2015) focused on shame expressions in Chinese.
As mentioned earlier, previous studies have identified some prototypical shame expressions in Chinese, ranging from 40 in Bai (2015) to 113 in Li et al. (2004).
Bai (2015), on the other hand, fully relied on laymen's judgment for both generalization (via a free listing task) and categorization (via a similarity sorting task) of shame expressions in Chinese.
Thus, our results do not provide sufficient support for claiming shame as one of the basic emotion types lexicalized in Chinese; on the contrary, our results suggest that some of the shame expressions previously proposed by lay participants may indeed be an artifact of the eliciting task (see our discussion on Bai (2015) in Models of Chinese emotion words).
In our view, these incongruous results are very likely attributable to the unsupervised nature of the free listing task; in addition, the lack of contrast with other emotions as the experiment focused on shame expressions only may also cause lay participants to confuse words of other related emotion categories as the core vocabulary of the emotion type of interest.
Li et al.'s study started with a list of 83 words that were related to 羞 xiu "shame/shyness," 耻 chi "disgrace," and 辱 ru "humiliation/shame" in the dictionary; the list was then expanded to 113 words and phrases by 10 native speakers; finally, the complete list of shame expressions were submitted to a judgment experiment for emotion sub-type with a separate group of 52 native speakers.
Let us begin naming and shaming these expressions, and agreeing as a planet to never to use them again.
Questioning a Latina's form of expression, shaming her on... International Women's Day?
1. Don't listen to anyone who tries to shame you for your sexual expression.
