Emotions are internal states that can be difficult to describe verbally. Worldwide, emotions are frequently conveyed, either metonymically or metaphorically, by color terms, although differences in color-emotion associations are observed cross-linguistically and cross-culturally. In this paper, we adopted a corpus-based approach to this issue and searched for collocations of basic color terms and basic words for emotions in Spanish vs. Mandarin. Results show some notable cross-linguistic similarities, as well as noticeable differences. Overall, collocations differ significantly between the two languages, with such differences being mostly driven by black, white, red, yellow, and pink. At the same time, overall, both languages associate the same colors with the same emotions, with such similarities being mostly driven by the notable similitudes in the use of black and pink, with other colors being used more differently. Cross-linguistic differences are thus more quantitative in nature than qualitative. We hypothesize that the observed similarities reflect common bodily experiences and cognitive processes involved in color-emotion association, whereas the dissimilarities can be due to differences in the cultural contexts, linguistic conventions, and social norms. Finally, we found that the associations revealed by our corpus approach resemble findings by research conducted with human participants and Large Language Models.
Xu et al. (Sat,) studied this question.