The Representation of Antecedents of Emotions in Northern and Southern Italy A Textual Analysis

Antecedents of six emotions in two different Italian subcultures were studied through the analysis of their verbal representations. One hundred participants (50 from northern Italy and 50 from southern Italy) were asked to write two short stories about each of the six emotions considered (anger, disgust, fear, sadness, happiness, and surprise). These stories were scored at six levels of progressively higher abstraction. The results showed that for each emotion there is a modal category, which frequently was identical, and some secondary categories that varied considerably with culture. Southern Italians showed significantly more interest in other people then northern Italians, both in the sense of worrying more about others' negative behavior and considering it very important to feel good about other people. Northern Italians tended to center their attention on the self; they reported greater worry about self-achievement than about relationships with other people and feared personal harm more than loneliness.