Abstract
The study is on the ’working emotion vocabulary’, i.e., words easily accessed when people are asked to list emotions. Participants (N 1146, 65.9% women, 15-30 year-olds), in an on-line task, listed 621 distinct words; 21 words were listed by 10%-65% (including joy, happiness, sadness, fear, anger, by 50% at least), 93 by 2%-9% (not including ’errors’, e.g., naming eliciting events), 507 by 1%. In sum, most listed words did refer to emotions and showed great variability. Women supplied more ’Correct’ Emotion Words (CEW) than men. The active (CEW) and the ’passive’ vocabulary (e.g., ability to recognize synonyms of emotion targets) were uncorrelated. Production of negative (4,95) and positive (3,76) CEW was significantly associated with emotion-related abilities and traits – e.g., recognition of facial expressions of emotions, expressive transparency, awareness of emotions, life satisfaction, loneliness, alexithymia and health. The results have implications for emotion communication and understanding.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
Derks, D., Fischer, A.H., Bos, A.E.R.: The role of emotion in computer-mediated communication: A review. Computers in Human Behavior 24, 766–785 (2008)
Parkinson, B.: Emotions in direct and remote social interaction: getting through the spaces between us. Computers in Human Behavior 24(4), 1510–1529 (2008)
Zeng, Z., Pantic, M., Roisman, G.I., Huang, T.S.: A Survey of Affect Recognition Methods: Audio, Visual, and Spontaneous Expressions. IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence 31(1), 39–58 (2009)
Zammuner, V.L.: Men’s and women’s lay theories of emotion. In: Fischer, A.H. (ed.) Gender and Emotion, pp. 48–60. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge (2000)
Zammuner, V.L.: Naive Theories of Emotional Experience: Jealousy. In: Russell, J.A., Fernandez Dols, J.M., Manstead, A.S.R., Wellenkamp, J.C. (eds.) Everyday Conceptions of Emotion: An Introduction to the Psychology, Anthropology and Linguistics of Emotion, pp. 435–456. Kluwer, Dordrecht (1995)
Frijda, N., Zammuner, V.L.: L’etichettamento delle proprie emozioni. Giornale Italiano di Psicologia 19(3), 389–423 (1992)
Shaver, P., Schwartz, J., Kirson, D., O’Connor, C.: Emotion Knowledge: further exploration of a prototype approach. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 52, 1061–1086 (1987)
Douglas-Cowie, E., Campbell, N., Cowie, R., Roach, P.: Emotional speech: Towards a new generation of databases. Speech Communication. Special Issue Speech and Emotion 40(1-2), 33–60 (2003)
Fehr, B., Russell, J.A.: Concept of Emotion Viewed From a Prototype Perspective. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 113(3), 464–486 (1984)
Schrauf, R.W., Sanchez, J.: Using Freelisting to Identify, Assess, and Characterize Age Differences in Shared Cultural Domains. Journal of Gerontology: Social Sciences 63(6), 385–393 (2008)
Zammuner, V.L., Bussolon, S., Peloso, O.: La conoscenza negli adolescenti delle somiglianze e differenze tra le emozioni. In: Grazzani, I., Riva Crugnola, C. (eds.), La competenza emotiva. Milano, Unicopli (in press, 2011)
Galli, C., Zammuner, V.: Concepts of emotion and dimensional ratings of Italian emotion words in pre-adolescents. In: XXVIII Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society, Vancouver (2006)
Galli, C., Zammuner, V., Romagnoli, G.: The conceptual organization of emotion concepts in pre-adolescents: a 2-task study. In: XXVII Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, Stresa (2005)
Van Goozen, S., Frijda, N.H.: Emotion words used in six European countries. European Journal of Social Psychology 23, 89–95 (1993)
Kobayashi, F., Schallert, D.L., Ogren, H.A.: Japanese and American folk vocabularies for emotions. Journal of Social Psychology 143, 451–478 (2003)
Niedenthal, P.M., Auxiette, C., Nugier, A., Dalle, N., Bonin, P., Fayol, M.: A prototype analysis of the French category “emotion”. Cognition and Emotion 18(3), 289–312 (2004)
Zammuner, V.L.: Concepts of emotion: ”Emotionness,” and dimensional ratings of Italian emotion words. Cognition and Emotion 12(2), 243–272 (1998)
Thelwall, M., Wilkinson, D., Uppal, S.: Data mining emotion in social network communication: Gender differences in MySpace. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology 61(1), 190–199 (2010)
Russell, J.A.: Culture and the categorization of emotion. Psychological Bulletin 110, 426–450 (1991)
Hupka, R.B., Lenton, A.P., Hutchison, K.A.: Universal development of emotion categories in natural language. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 77, 247–278 (1999)
Zammuner, V.L., Cigala, A.: La conoscenza delle emozioni nei bambini in eta’ scolare. Età Evolutiva 69, 19–42 (2001)
Zammuner, V.L.: Measurement and training on-line of emotional intelligence and competencies, and relevant criterion and socio-demographic variables in career starters. In: INTED 2010 Proceedings, CD (2010)
Zammuner, V.L., Galli, C.: La conoscenza delle emozioni negli adolescenti, e in giovani adulti. Tre studi con il compito di produzione spontanea di parole. In: Matarazzo, O. (ed.) Emozioni e adolescenza, Napoli, Liguori, pp. 197–224 (2001)
Zammuner, V.L., Casnici, M., Prencipe, G., Scapin, F., Zonta, S., Galli, C.: Emotional lexicon literacy as an index of emotional intelligence and a predictor of well-being and adequate social functioning. In: ICP 2008, CD rom Poster presentations (2008)
Zammuner, V.L.: Termini emotivi nel lessico italiano e loro categorizzazione per somiglianza. In: Arcuri, L., Boscolo, P., Peressotti, F. (eds.) Cognition and Language: A Long Story, Padova, Cleup, pp. 309–315 (2008)
Ortony, A., Clore, G.L., Foss, M.A.: The referential structure of the affective lexicon. Cognitive Science 11, 341–364 (1987)
Zeng, Z., Pantic, M., Roisman, G.I., Huang, T.S.: A Survey of Affect Recognition Methods: Audio, Visual, and Spontaneous Expressions. IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence 31(1), 39–58 (2009)
Schrauf, R.W., Sanchez, J.: The Preponderance of Negative Emotion Words in the Emotion Lexicon: A Cross-generational and Cross-linguistic Study. J. of Multilingual and Multicultural Development 25(2&3), 266–284 (2004)
Romney, A.K., Moore, C.C., Rusch, C.D.: Cultural universals: Measuring the semantic structure of emotion terms in English and Japanese. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 94, 5489–5494 (1997)
Schwarz, N., Clore, G.L.: Mood, misattribution, and judgements of well-being: Informative and directive functions of affective states. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 45, 513–523 (1983)
Schimmack, U., Reisenzein, R.: Cognitive Processes Involved in Similarity Judgments of Emotions. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 73(4), 645–661 (1997)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2011 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Zammuner, V.L. (2011). People’s Active Emotion Vocabulary: Free Listing of Emotion Labels and Their Association to Salient Psychological Variables. In: Esposito, A., Vinciarelli, A., Vicsi, K., Pelachaud, C., Nijholt, A. (eds) Analysis of Verbal and Nonverbal Communication and Enactment. The Processing Issues. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 6800. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-25775-9_40
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-25775-9_40
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-642-25774-2
Online ISBN: 978-3-642-25775-9
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)