Knowledge of emotion concepts: structure of basic emotions on the basis of an intensity-level linguistic production task.

How are emotions conceptualized? Does language help us understand the structure and articulation of emotion concepts? What is included in the 'centre' and in the periphery of the semantic domain of a target ('basic') emotion (family)? As the emotion lexicon of western languages is very rich, are there (emotion) words that denote (in speakers' conceptualizations, as assessed by consensual language usage) specific features of the target emotion (family), such as (variations in) intensity, arousal, appraisal, hedonic tone, physiological, expressive, and behavioural responses, and the emotion's causes and consequences? The study to be presented (carried out within a larger research project on emotional intelligence, financed by Fondazione Cariparo) addressed these issues by means of a novel linguistic free production task. For each of six target ('basic') emotions (happiness, surprise, fear, anger, sadness, disgust) young Italian people were asked, to provide two words, denoting an emotion respectively of a "higher intensity", and of a "lesser intensity". The task was completed online by participants (N = 2.097). Participants' productions, automatically recorded in a data base, were later checked for spelling errors; grammatical variations were then grouped together. The results obtained from this task showed that very many distinct words (with a range of about 100-400 words) were produced for each target emotion and each 'intensity level' by participants. The analysis of rank-order word frequencies (by emotion and intensity-level) showed that variety rather than consensus was the rule: on average none to one word at most was produced by at least 20% of the sample, one to six words were produced by at least 5% of the sample, and about 10-20 words were produced by at least 1% of the sample. The total number of distinct words produced by at least 1% to describe emotions of "higher intensity" was generally lower (n 60) than that produced to describe emotions of "lesser intensity" (n 78). The conceptual (content) analysis of produced words showed that for all emotions and both intensity level participants often listed, in addition to 'proper' emotion words depicting variations in 'intensity' and arousal, also words referring to appraisal, hedonic tone, physiological, expressive, and behavioural responses, and finally words referring to eliciting events and to dispositional traits. Individual differences in production (e.g., related to gender and education level) were also explored. In sum, the word-production analyses enables us to depict the prototypical concepual schema for each target emotion - e.g., depression, despair, pain, and crying depict the 'core' of high intensity SADNESS, i.e., the main nucleus of the prototype, whereas anguish, loneliness, melancholy, suffering, etc. depict its 'periphery' or the less exemplary emotion-family features; conversely, melancholy, together with sorrow, depict the 'core' of low intensity SADNESS, whereas bitterness, delusion, apathy, bad mood, etc. depict its 'periphery'. In conclusion, the results help us understand how six 'basic' emotions concepts are structured, organized, and what is the 'active' emotion lexicon in the linguistic community. Furthermore, the results enable us to construct (define) a data base for the Italian language as regards the meaning that people attach to specific emotion words (e.g., in relation to "intensity", to how intercheangeable words are in actual linguistic usage, and so forth).