Central emotions and hubs in a colexification network

Abstract

By focusing on colexification, we detected central emotions sharing semantic commonalities with many other emotions in terms of a semantic relationship of both similarity and associativity. In analysis, we created colexification networks from multiple languages by assigning a concept to a vertex and colexification to an edge. We identify concepts of emotions with a large weight in the colexification network and specify central emotions by finding hub emotions. Our resultant central emotions are four: “GOOD,” “WANT,” “BAD,” and “LOVE.”