Contribution
Description: Some studies on the emotional lexicon try to understand the nature of people's emotion concepts as they are expressed in natural language, i.e., how people conceptualize emotions, and which relationship exists between the lexicon and cognitive representations. We assume that emotional experiences are multicomponential (e.g., Frijda, 1986; Scherer, 1984) and, following Zammuner (1998), that emotion terms designate one or more aspects of the experiences, by denoting (i) a specific feature or component of the emotion (e.g., valence, intensity, duration, etc.), or its causes and consequences, or (ii) a pattern of such features. It remains an open question whether emotions terms of the natural language can tell us something about emotion experiences, as some argue (e.g., Frijda, Markam, Sato & Wiers, 1995), and not only about emotion concepts.
The present research analyzed preadolescents' knowledge of emotion concepts in a series of three studies. The purpose of the studies was to test whether preadolescents' categorization of emotions can be explained by the prototypical model of categorization (e.g., Rosch, 1975), as found for adults (e.g., Fehr & Russell, 1984; Zammuner, 1998), following closely the approach used by Zammuner (1998). Two measures of prototypicality were assessed as follows: (1) the likelihood that a word is listed spontaneously by subjects as an instance of the emotion category; (2) the likelihood that a word is quickly judged as referring to an emotion on a dichotomous rating task (word categorisation). The main hypothesis was that prototypicality of emotion concepts is a complex (often implicit) evaluation on a set of subjective-state aspects denoted by the word, i.e., valence (or hedonic tone), intensity and duration.
In the first study, 297 preadolescents (aged 10 to 14) were asked to list all the emotions they could think of in five minutes (free listing of emotion exemplars). In the second experimental study, each of 67 preadolescents judged 62 emotion terms answering the question "Is [the term] an emotion?" by giving a Yes or Not judgement as quickly as possible (word categorisation task, with reaction time as dependent variable). In the third study, three independent samples of preadolescent (N total: 278 subjects), assessed 62 Italian emotion terms on the dimensions of valence, intensity and duration, answering pen-and-pencil questionnaires.
Preliminary correlational analyses showed significant correlations among the various evaluations of emotion terms given by subjects; evaluations were correlated with frequency of free listing of emotion exemplars and with mean reaction times of correct emotion-term categorisation. Two regression analyses were performed to test the main hypothesis that valence, intensity and duration predict each prototypicality measure. Results showed that valence was the most important predictor of prototipycality, which was likely to be more influenced by folk theory. In addition, duration (but not intensity, as found for adults) appeared to be a dimension that subsumes information about other emotion features. In sum, the results indicate that preadolescents' emotion concepts are fuzzy categories, and that prototypicality judgements are summary-like evaluations of a complex computation that considers different emotional aspects denoted by a word.
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