A taxonomy for scenes

Abstract

Tomkins [Tomkins, S. (1979). Script theory: Differential magnification of affects. In: C. Keasey (Ed.), Nebraska Symposium on Motivation, Vol. 26 (pp. 201–236). Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press; Tomkins, S. (1987). Script theory. In: J. Aronoff, A. Rabin, & R. Zucker (Eds.), The Emergence of Personality (pp. 147–216). New York: Springer] proposed that personality is built from the experience of scenes, which minimally consist of an emotion and an event evoking that emotion. This study sought to identify a taxonomy of emotion-eliciting events. Examples of specific events eliciting love, joy, sadness, anger, and fear were collected from 200 participants, another 120 participants independently sorted these examples for similarity, and a hierarchical cluster analysis was run on these similarity sorts. The resulting tree diagram displayed categories of events at varying levels of abstraction. Individual differences were found in the types of events offered for each of the five emotions.