What makes a word a good representative of the category of “emotion”? The role of feelings and interoception.

Abstract

The words we use to describe emotions vary in terms of prototypicality; that is, some of these words may be more representative of the semantic category of emotion than others (e.g., anger refers more clearly to an emotion than boredom). Based on a multicomponential conception of emotions, the aim of the present study was to examine the contribution of several variables to emotion prototypicality. Some of those variables are related to the distinct components of emotions: evaluation, action, body expression, internal body sensations (interoception), and feelings. Other variables are related to the concreteness/abstractness distinction: sensory experience, social interaction, thought, and morality. We collected ratings for these variables for a large set of words (1,286) which varied in emotion prototypicality. A regression analysis revealed that the variables that most contributed to emotion prototypicality were feelings and interoception. Furthermore, a factor analysis identified two underlying factors: socioemotional polarity and emotional experience. The scores of each word in both factors were used to create a two-dimensional space and a density plot which provides relevant information about the organization of emotion concepts in memory.