Measurement of Emotions in Different Groups

Abstract

One of the prerequisites for the continuation of a society is that people can communicate with each other in an adequate way. This is mainly done by using the written or spoken word. By means of words we pass on thoughts, ideas, reactions and feelings. What interests us here is what may be called verbal communication. In everyday verbal communication people often presuppose that every word used by them has the same meaning to those they address as to themselves. As a rule this presupposition is probably unconscious, but it may also be conscious. The way we see it this presupposition is often erroneous. Two individuals may mean entirely different things by the same word. We will not discuss the meaning of meaning here; the common-sense meaning of meaning is enough for us. But we want to make a distinction between the two kinds of meaning a word, a verbal symbol, may have. It makes sense to talk of the descriptive meaning of a word and the emotive meaning of a word. One word may have the same descriptive meaning to two individuals but at the same time a different emotive meaning just as it may have a different descriptive meaning but the same emotive meaning. We will here chiefly discuss the emotive meaning. Our basic assumption is that if a word has a different emotive or descriptive meaning to two individuals, the two individuals do not belong to the same group or they used to belong to different groups. We then say that these two individuals do not live in the same symbol environment, i.e. the word is not attached to the same object for the two individuals. It is not associated with similar behaviotir and it is not associated with similar feeling. From this it follows that the situation or situations in which a word has been learned are of prime importance for the individual's linguistic usage. These ideas are mainly taken from Torgny T. Segerstedt.1) It is not absolutely necessary that a word with emotive meaning is consciously associated with a certain object, behaviour or readiness for action. That is to say, its emotive meaning need not be dependent, it may be independent; the word is solely emotional. The chief task of the word, from a sociological point of view, is to create a feeling to strengthen or keep the cohesion within the group.