By Conor Seyle, PBB Research Officer
Here is a thought experiment for you. Define “happiness,” “affection,” ”joy” and “caring” without making the definitions overlap significantly. It’s hard. It’s difficult to take such basic concepts – particularly words like this, that refer to our internal emotional experiences – and break them down into specific definitions that really capture the distinction between the different ideas. This difficulty was something that the PBB team in Indonesia ran into recently. As a part of the trip to Indonesia, one goal was to make sure that the scales and instruments that we’re using are accurately translated into Indonesian. To do that, we had to make sure that the subtle differences between words were accurately reflected in the Indonesian terms we used.
