6 Minute English / How culture affects sadness

Note: This is not a word-for-word transcript.

Hello. This is 6 Minute English from BBC Learning English. I m Sam.

And I m Neil. When Helen Russell was three years old, her new-born baby sister died suddenly. Looking back at that sad time, Helen remembers making a big decision she wanted to be happy. She became a bestselling author and wrote a book called, The Atlas of Happiness. She got married, and even moved to the famously happy city of Copenhagen in Denmark.

But the sadness Helen felt didn t disappear, and the longer she lived abroad, the more she wondered whether her feelings were somehow connected to being born in England, into a culture where, traditionally, expressing your emotions was discouraged.

In this programme, we ll be investigating how the way people express sadness is influenced by their culture, and, as usual, we ll be learning some new, useful vocabulary as well.

But first I have a question for you, Neil. In English there are many idioms which describe being sad, including down in the dumps, meaning that you feel miserable and depressed. Also, emotions are often associated with colours, for example you might go red with anger, or turn green with envy. But which colour is associated with sadness? Is it:

a) yellow?b) blue? or,c) brown?

I think the answer is blue.

OK, Neil. We ll find out the later in the programme. Around the world, cultures express emotions very differently. In Spain, flamenco performers express their emotions with colourful displays of song and dance, whereas in Japan, crying is considered weak and shameful. To discover more about how British people express their feelings, Helen Russell interviewed, Thomas Dixon, a professor at the Centre for the History of Emotion, for BBC World Service programme, The Documentary:

Professor Thomas DixonThe word sad, as you will know, Helen, literally means sated or full. So, it s earliest use is in English, it means being literally fed up, being full of something sad or sated means heavy and full. And then of course we have this huge vocabulary of melancholy, sorrow, grief, depression and many, many other terms, and they all mean slightly different things.