Q.A tourist from Japan and a tourist from Brazil both watch the same video of a person receiving very bad news and reacting with obvious grief. Both tourists immediately and correctly recognise that the person is sad, even though neither speaks the other's language or has visited the other's country. Yet, when each tourist is later asked to describe, in as much detail as their own language allows, exactly what kind of sadness or related feeling the person seems to be showing, their descriptions differ quite a lot in the number and shades of distinct emotion-words each uses. Explain both of these observations using what you have learnt about the nature of emotions.

Emotion is a complex pattern of arousal, subjective feeling, and cognitive interpretation, involving both physiological and psychological reactions, and is generally treated as distinct from — and broader than — the related concepts of 'feeling' (the pleasure–pain dimension of an emotional experience) and 'mood' (a longer-lasting but lower-intensity affective state). Because emotion is fundamentally subjective, its experience genuinely varies from person to person, and psychologists have found it difficult to agree on one single, definitive list of basic emotions. Even so, several influential proposals converge on a similar core: one widely cited view holds that at least six emotions — anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, and surprise — are experienced and recognised virtually everywhere; Izard proposed a broader list of ten basic emotions; and Plutchik proposed eight primary emotions arranged in four pairs of opposites (including joy–sadness), with all other emotions arising as blends of these primaries.

A closely related, separately documented finding is that basic facial expressions themselves — the outward, visible signal of an underlying basic emotion like sadness — appear to be inborn and universal across humans, a view originally proposed by Darwin and supported by later research evidence. This universality of the basic expression is exactly why two people from entirely different cultures, who share no common language, can nonetheless both correctly and immediately recognise the same basic emotion (such as sadness or grief) simply from watching someone's face and behaviour — the biological signal itself does not require translation. …