Pride, joy, sadness, jealousy, and envy: lay theories by Dutch subjects, and a comparison with Italians

Lay theories” (LT) of emotion of 117 Dutch male and female university students were studied using a questionnaire that described in a vignette format 5 events, each typical of one of 5 emotion constellations. Subjects attributed to same-sex or to opposite-sex event protagonists aspects of the emotional experience, including social sharing of felt emotions and perceived 'adequacy' of the experience. Subjects answered using category lists of cognate items - e.g., “Joy, happiness, euphoria, pride, cheerfulness”, and “Anxiety, fear, anguish, dread” was a category for the felt-emotion question. Subjects judged events defined either as “very salient” on the basis of results obtained in previous studies, or as “less salient”. Results showed that LT expressed by subjects are quite rich and complex. The beliefs subjects hold, and their “richness”, vary first of all as a function of the specific emotion constellation, and of its hedonic tone (e.g., LT for negatively toned constellations were typically more articulate than those for positively toned ones), as well as a function of salient features of the judged event (e.g., reactions such as attempts at regulation characterize mostly negatively valenced constellations, but are more prominent for jealousy events than for sadness ones). Men and women overall express similar rather than different theories, and theories that are “egalitarian” rather than gender-differentiated. Observed differences, however, tend to be gender-congruent rather than gender-incongruent, especially for males. A few interesting cultural differences emerge when comparing Dutch theories to those held by Italians.