Across various disciplines a number of methods have emerged that attempt to establish equivalence between various concepts that words in various languages point to. This study reports the results of a study that adopts a reference-based methodology which uses emotional situations to elicit emotion labels in four emotion categories (ANGER,SHAME,GUILT, and PRIDE). The similarities and differences in how five different lingual populations (English, German, French, Spanish, Russian) completed the task are assessed. The results are discussed in the light of differences in the lexicalization of specific emotion domains and cultural factors mediating the emotion-labelling process.