This article sheds light on the significant yet nuanced roles of shame and guilt in influencing moral behaviour, a phenomenon that became particularly prominent during the COVID-19 pandemic with the community’s heightened desire to be seen as moral. These emotions are central to human interactions, and the question of how they are conveyed linguistically is a vast and important one. Our study contributes to this area by analysing the discourses around shame and guilt in English and Japanese online forums, focusing on the terms shame, guilt, haji (‘shame’) and zaiakukan (‘guilt’). We utilise a mix of corpus-based methods and natural language processing tools, including word embeddings, to examine the contexts of these emotion terms and identify semantically similar expressions. Our findings indicate both overlaps and distinct differences in the semantic landscapes of shame and guilt within and across the two languages, highlighting nuanced ways in which these emotions are expressed and distinguished. This investigation provides insights into the complex dynamics between emotion words and the internal states they denote, suggesting avenues for further research in this linguistically rich area.

中文翻译：

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英语和日语中“羞耻”和“内疚”的语义空间对比

本文阐明了羞耻和内疚在影响道德行为方面的重要而微妙的作用，这种现象在 COVID-19 大流行期间变得尤为突出，因为社区越来越渴望被视为有道德。这些情感是人类互动的核心，如何用语言表达它们是一个巨大而重要的问题。我们的研究通过分析英语和日语在线论坛中有关羞耻和内疚的话语，重点关注这些术语，为这一领域做出了贡献耻辱,有罪,哈吉（“羞耻”）和财会馆（'有罪'）。我们结合使用基于语料库的方法和自然语言处理工具（包括词嵌入）来检查这些情感术语的上下文并识别语义上相似的表达。我们的研究结果表明，两种语言内部和跨语言的羞耻和内疚语义景观既有重叠，又有明显的差异，突出了这些情感表达和区分的微妙方式。这项研究提供了对情感词与其所表示的内部状态之间复杂动态的见解，为这个语言丰富的领域的进一步研究提供了途径。