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Abstract
The widely accepted two-dimensional circumplex model of emotions posits that most instances of human emotional experience can be understood within the two general dimensions of valence and activation. Currently, this model is facing some criticism, because complex emotions in particular are hard to define within only these two general dimensions. The present theory-driven study introduces an innovative analytical approach working in a way other than the conventional, two-dimensional paradigm. The main goal was to map and project semantic emotion space in terms of mutual positions of various emotion prototypical categories. Participants (N = 187; 54.5% females) judged 16 discrete emotions in terms of valence, intensity, controllability and utility. The results revealed that these four dimensional input measures were uncorrelated. This implies that valence, intensity, controllability and utility represented clearly different qualities of discrete emotions in the judgments of the participants. Based on this data, we constructed a 3D hypercube-projection and compared it with various two-dimensional projections. This contrasting enabled us to detect several sources of bias when working with the traditional, two-dimensional analytical approach. Contrasting two-dimensional and three-dimensional projections revealed that the 2D models provided biased insights about how emotions are conceptually related to one another along multiple dimensions. The results of the present study point out the reductionist nature of the two-dimensional paradigm in the psychological theory of emotions and challenge the widely accepted circumplex model.
Highlights
Language is a primary tool of emotion research and the primary access to the affective experience of the self and others (Storm and Storm, 2005)
We argue that using a simple twodimensional model for an in-depth analysis of the human emotional experience may lead to a risk of reduction of the complexity of the phenomena
The present study revealed the following very important insights: (1) sources of bias when working in a two-dimensional paradigm were identified; (2) emotions that represent limits or frontiers of semantic emotion space were found; (3) no emotion prototype was settled in the central area of 3D emotion space; (4) the mutual multidimensional positions of emotional prototypes in the 3D hypercube-projection enable the multidimensional semantic similarity of used emotional
Summary
Language is a primary tool of emotion research and the primary access to the affective experience of the self and others (Storm and Storm, 2005). Aside from some experimental (e.g., Gerdes et al, 2013; Grol and De Raedt, 2014; Yu et al, 2015) and observational research (e.g., Jensen, 2014; Rohlf and Krahé, 2015), a huge number of current empirical studies used linguistic properties when exploring the terrain of Emotion Space in 3D Hypercube-Projection human emotional experience (e.g., Crutch et al, 2013; Bayer and Schacht, 2014; Gallant and Yang, 2014; Schindler et al, 2014). People construct and understand their emotional experience through the abstract representations of emotions in language. For this reason, it is not surprising that psycholinguistics attract many researchers who seek out the links between language, cognitive processes and emotional experience (Aznar and Tenenbaum, 2013; Fisher et al, 2014; Verhees et al, 2015). The present study follows just this line of research and investigates interrelations between the experiential component of emotions and the anchoring of emotional concepts in language
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