Cultural models of emotion manifest in descriptions of everyday experience: A case study of the United States and Belgium.

Language provides a window onto how people conceptualize their subjective experiences, including emotions. Although rare, linguistic analyses that go beyond emotion words provide deep insights into emotional experience across cultures. In this study, we explored cultural models of emotion prevalent in the United States and Belgium using verbal descriptions of recent emotional events collected in 2020-2022 from speakers of North American (U.S.) English and Belgian Dutch in the form of semistructured interviews. We analyzed the interviews using three complementary approaches: (1) topic modeling to characterize content, (2) word counting to examine linguistic resources, and (3) inductive analysis to uncover broader themes. Our findings revealed notable cultural differences alongside some similarities. U.S. English speakers used more first-person pronouns and emotion words, emphasized high-arousal emotions, and prioritized asserting personal achievements and openly expressing their feelings. In contrast, Belgian Dutch speakers' descriptions reflected a more moderated approach to emotion, illustrating how social standards and broader worldviews gave meaning to the events, with the use of fewer first-person pronouns and more language focused on relativization and comparison. These differences are unlikely to be fully explained by differences in language structure or the analytical tools used. Our observations are consistent with previous psychological research on U.S. and Belgian culture. At the same time, our samples came only from California and Flanders, respectively, and had no recent history of immigration, potentially limiting the generalizability of our findings. We evaluate our approach against other means of exploring the conceptualization of emotion across cultures. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).