Wu and Shaver took a step forward. Interesting. When I look at the emotion lexicon, you will have a sad love cluster. Now, how about that? Let's focus on romantic love alone. Wu and Shaver asked 100 American and 100 mainland Chinese subjects to list the features of love. That's exactly like what you did at the beginning. What were the top 20 features of love? Now, you might find some more. I'm not going to collect your survey. I'm not going to collect your handout. But you can compare your responses with this table. Of the 100 American subjects, they listed happiness, caring, trust, sharing, being together. These are the top 20. How about Chinese? Now, Chinese got a bigger table, not because I'm Chinese. It's because they put down Chinese characters, and then the author, Shelley Wu, translated it into English. Now, putting aside the translation. You might disagree with some of the translation. Michelle [inaudible]. That is Cantonese. How could that be excitement? But putting that aside, we respect, we give respect to the authors. Alright? So for the Chinese, they put down all the Chinese characters, and Shelley Wu translated it. Putting aside how bad the translation or how good they are, at least those are the top 20 for American subjects. Those are the top 20 for the Chinese subjects. Actually to be exact, Beijing subjects. So if you are coming from the South part of China, you may say, "We'll never say that." That sort of a thing. Look at that. What is or what terms are overlapping between the two? American subjects have happiness, caring, trust, excitement, understanding. The same five terms could be found in the Chinese subjects. So, there are 30% of terms overlapping between the two subject pools. So, do Chinese have romantic love or are the Chinese understanding of romantic love similar to Americans' understanding of romantic love? Well, if you look at that, there are some parallels between the two. It looks like, we know what romantic love is and we share some common understanding as well. But let me continue my argument about sad love. If you look at the Chinese subjects, now, with all top 20 listed by the American subjects, they are all positive. Now, I don't see any negative terms here, maybe sex is, but it depends, right? Good and bad depends on how you define it. But if you look at the Chinese subjects, four terms, at least four terms are pretty negative. You won't say painful is not negative, right? Sharing pain, inseparable, jealousy. That takes up 20%. These four terms took up 20% of the 20 terms listed. Now, the question that comes to here is that we study the love songs, we check out the lyrics, we study that emotion lexicon, and now we study the features. The features. I don't go to the dictionary, I don't go to the books. I asked your good self. You experience romantic love, tell me the features. And look at that, in all cases, there are some common features shared by the two languages. Happiness and caring are the two most frequently listed features. Chinese listed more negative features of love. I would even say that Americans listed zero negative features. But whereas for Chinese subjects, they listed four negative features. The painful aspects of the love has been elaborated in the Chinese understanding of romantic love. Question is why? It's the candy time. Why do Chinese... Even if you're not Chinese, you can tell me. Maybe you have a Chinese girlfriend or Chinese boyfriend, right? Why do Chinese always look at love as something unpleasant or negative? You want a candy? No. I just have a digressing question. No. Here's the thing. You've got to answer me first, then you can ask me a question. Alright. Fair, right? I'm in-charge. This is my playground. Of course. Okay. Yes. So, the. .. Why do Chinese always look at love as something unpleasant, negative? Well, you could say Chinese are more realistic and rational. Really? That's very positive. Please elaborate. I'll give you a candy. Okay. Okay. I mean, you have to be realistic and rational to realize the negative aspects of life. So what is positive? Romantic love is negative, right? Is there anything positive? It's just some aspects are negative. Okay. But of course, you can say that's from the lexicon research. There are positive aspects. Alright. You can ask me a question now. Okay. Thank you. You are welcome. I mean, Americans are famously positive in... Are they? Yes. Yes. Yes. So I just wonder, is there any research on maybe Europeans? I'm sure the results would be somewhat different if you ask an Englishman or German. This is actually a relevant question, you are not detouring. Thank you. What is your name? Percy. Percy. I love it. One of the good teachers in this university is called Percy as well. Well, he asked a very sensible question. Michelle, why do you just talk about Chinese and Americans? If I could keep you here forever, I'll cover every single culture. My interest is always doing cross-cultural studies, and here, I agree. I just stick to Americans, I just stick to Chinese. But what about European s or even in Europe, what about Eastern Europe and Western Europe? I met friends from Western Germany, they would tell me, "I am different from East Germany," and you would tell a lot of thing s. Even for Chinese, I emphasize that this is from Beijing. The data are from Beijing. If you get the data from the South part of China, the results could have been different. I could tell you the broad picture is that for Europeans, who are willing to fill out the questionnaire whatsoever, they tend to be more positive for romantic love. But I'm sure, if you go down to different cities, different parts of Europe, they will have a different story. Nowadays, the trend is moving beyond "Americans versus Chinese". There will be other different parts of the world, or even they look at different language regions. How about in this language, how about in that. To advance the understanding of emotion or romantic love, we need to go beyond the American and the Chinese boundaries. Thank you, Percy. Okay. Good name. What else? Chinese are being realistic. Now, you detoured me. Okay. So my question was, why do Chinese always look at the sad or painful aspect s of romantic love? [inaudible] Sit down please, you are my guest. [inaudible] Okay. I think the Western. .. [inaudible] Yes. I think the Western people may experienced the Renaissance time. I mean, [inaudible]. What is it? Renaissance. Yeah. Yeah. So they may more concentrate on themselves, their feelings, but Chinese people didn't experience that time, so they may more concentrate on the society, about the relationship between themselves and the society, so they may pay more attention on feeling the pain. But the Western people would like to just feel it themselves. Okay. Feel themselves, so they pay more attention on the emotions, the happiness, and some other emotions. So I think it is because of the different cultural context backgrounds. That is a good point as well, and you are? My name is Rorschach. Rorschach. Wow. Very. I have another opinion. Okay. I'll come back to you later. Alright. Because it's my playground. Let me continue. Otherwise, I'll keep you forever. You won't like me. You only get one and a half hour here, okay? I want to make sure that you leave on time. Basically, both of them were saying that regardless of your cultural background, you will experience the positive and the negative aspects of love. But it's just when you are reporting it, Chinese are trying to be more realistic. They emphasize the bad side, or maybe that's us, we never overjoy. That's not good. We are trying to be humble. Yeah, it's painful , blah, blah, blah. But do you have fun? Yeah. But I just don't want to talk about it. Maybe it's individualism. Maybe we'll come to that later. Maybe other reasons. We both have the good things and the bad things, but Western or people in the US prefer emphasizing the good things. Chinese as usual, we are humble, we want to emphasize the dark side or the bad side. Other than that, do I have any other? Yes. I feel like Chinese don't really value romantic love much. So when it comes to romantic love, people consider many material things also. So when it becomes a conflict, it causes your painful feelings. But when you love someone so much, but you are not compatible on your material levels, so it causes you pain. I think that is one reason. Okay. So maybe there are other considerations. Just like Francis Hsu said, "To love someone, to an American, love is everything or emotions is everything. For Chinese, to a Chinese, to love, you have love and other stuff to consider as well." It could be. Every relationship can be costly. It's a high maintenance activity, and I know you won't trust me, especially you are not married. But I could tell you that, it costs a lot, not only money, but emotionally. Alright. So I wish I had an answer. Michelle, tell me then, why? I don't know. People would tell you that, that's based on the self-report, and that's the beautiful part of it. It's on the descriptive side of the story. They can say whatever, being a subject is really cool. You could write down anything. I don't like you, I hate you, I love you, whatsoever. But when we look at the results, it's only a descriptive level of data. How could I go around it? Well, is that possible? Maybe for Chinese, they were born to be sad, and that's why they look at the dark side of every aspect. How can I prove that? I can't. I mean, as soon as the baby is born, open up the brain and look at the sad side of story. I could not do that. Alright? So is that possible? Then maybe afterwards, after they grow up, the parents told them, "You think love is romantic, love is good? You've got to start saving up for the apartment or buy a house, a mansion, before you even think about other stuff as well." So is that nature or nurture? The same kind of story. Unlike physical science, you have the physical objects to do your experiment. When you are dealing with human beings we are difficult. Alright?
