{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.03125, 'fraction_numerical': 0.017045454545454544, 'mean_word_length': 5.010238907849829, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 1, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
Beyond the universality-specificity dichotomy

For the past three decades theorising and research on the relationship between culture and emotion has tended to concentrate on the seemingly straightforward issue of whether or not emotions are universal. Within psychology this debate was reinvigorated in the 1960s by the pioneering research of Ekman and Izard, who were the first to conduct systematic cross-cultural studies on facial expressions in order to test Darwin’s idea about the universality of emotion expressions. Ekman’s original motivation in conducting this research was to try to settle the issue of whether emotion expressions are universal or culturally specific by collecting reliable empirical evidence, rather than relying on theoretical arguments, or the intuitions and judgements made by one anthropologist on the basis of his or her fieldwork. ‘‘I would just get the facts. I was excited that I might be able to settle a 100-year-old dispute, about such a fundamental issue’’ (p. 371), he writes in the afterword to the third edition of Darwin’s (1872/1998) The expression of the emotions in man and animals. In this afterword, he provides a personal account of the dispute in which he remembers that he started the research with other assumptions, but that the evidence led him to conclude that there was no other way to interpret the data: ‘‘Our evidence, and that of others, shows only that when people are experiencing strong emotions, are not making any attempt to mask their expressions, the expression will be the same regardless of age, race, culture, sex and education. That is a powerful finding’’ (p. 391). This conclusion, however, was not universally shared by other researchers, and COGNITION AND EMOTION, 2002, 16 (1), 1–9