The dimensions of emotional meaning in modern Greek

Abstract

The aim of this study was to investigate the meaning structure of emotion terms from the Greek lexicon, and to assess commonalities and differences with the maps of emotional words obtained in a prior study of neo-Latin languages, a linguistic family sharing ancient roots with the Greek tongue. Twelve native speakers contributed to the selection of 33 Greek terms with a clear emotional meaning and an independent sample of 30 participants evaluated the pairwise similarities among the target words. The similarity ratings were subjected to multidimensional scaling analyses, yielding a three-dimensional configuration (Valence, Physiological Activation and Potency) in which the coping potential dimension (Potency) was more important than, or at least as important as, the Physiological Activation dimension. The map resembled that previously identified for the core neo-Latin languages, namely Italian, French and Spanish, and was quite different from those obtained for other more peripheral neo-Latin languages, and also from those obtained in some studies involving English emotion lexicon. Reasons for these similarities and differences are discussed.