Exploring the cultural conceptualization of emotions across national language varieties: a multifactorial profile-based account of PRIDE in European and Brazilian Portuguese

Supporting the hypothesis that emotions are culturally constructed, this article compares the cultural conceptualization of pride in European and Brazilian Portuguese (EP/BP). Individualistic/collectivistic as well as other cultural influences that determine the conceptual variation of pride in pluricentric Portuguese are examined. Adopting a sociocognitive view of language and applying a multifactorial usage-feature and profile-based methodology, this study combines a feature-based qualitative analysis of 500 occurrences of orgulho 'pride' and vaidade 'vanity' from a corpus of blogs with their subsequent multivariate statistic modeling. The multiple correspondence analysis reveals two clusters of features, namely, self-centered pride and other-directed pride. Logistic regression confirmed that EP appears to be more associated with other-directed pride, which is in line with the more collectivist and restrained Portuguese culture, whereas BP is more connected with self-centered pride. Accordingly, morally good pride is salient in EP. Brazil's high power distance can also explain the prominence of negative and bad pride in BP.