Abstract
The concept of emotion can be organized within a hypothetical space comprising a limited number of dimensions representing essential properties of emotion. The present study examined cultural influences on such conceptual structure by comparing the performance of emotion word classification between Japanese and Korean individuals. Two types of emotional words were used; central concepts, highly typical examples of emotion, and less typical peripheral concepts. Participants classified 30 words into groups based on conceptual similarity. MDS analyses revealed a three-dimensional structure with valence, social engagement, and arousal dimensions for both cultures, with the valence dimension being the most salient one. The Japanese prioritized the social engagement over the arousal while the Koreans showed sensitivities to the arousal dimension. Although the conceptual structure was similar for the two countries, the weight of importance among the three dimensions seems to be different, reflecting each culture’s values and communication styles.
Highlights
IntroductionOne of the approaches to decipher the complexity is to organize emotions in terms of a limited number of characteristics or dimensions, such as how different colors can be distinguished in terms of the variations of brightness, hue, and saturation (Fontaine et al, 2007)
The multi-dimensional model of emotion concepts presumes that emotional characteristics vary along some fundamental dimensions, such as positivity, and the strengths of these characteristics determine the position of each concept within the model
The present study investigated the multi-dimensional structure of emotional concepts among Japanese and Korean individuals by asking them to classify central and peripheral concepts into groups based on similarity
Summary
One of the approaches to decipher the complexity is to organize emotions in terms of a limited number of characteristics or dimensions, such as how different colors can be distinguished in terms of the variations of brightness, hue, and saturation (Fontaine et al, 2007). A crucial mission of research with this approach is to identify how many underlying dimensions there are and what properties they represent. In order to identify underlying dimensions, inter-correlations among different emotions are measured through people’s perception and classification of emotion labels (Russell et al, 1989; Västfjäll et al, 2002; Yik and Russell, 2003), facial expressions
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