Mental representations of affect knowledge

The circumplex structure derived from similarity ratings of affect words is assumed to be a conceptual representation of affect anchored in semantic knowledge. Recently, it been suggested that this structure is not based on semantic knowledge at all, but may instead reflect a type of episodic knowledge: The degree to which emotions covary in everyday life. In two experience-sampling studies, we compared the semantic and the episodic hypotheses by comparing participants’ similarity ratings to the observed covariations in their own affective experience computed from their momentary reports. In Study 2, participants also provided estimates of the degree to which their emotions covaried. Evidence from both studies indicate that similarity judgements are related both to semantic and episodic information, indicating that a pure episodic account of similarity ratings, and the mental representation of affect that they reflect, is untenable. Much of the psychological knowledge that we have generated is based on what people tell us in response to the questions we ask. No where is this more true than in research on emotion. We ask participants to judge the similarity of emotion words, the emotional content contained in facial expressions, pictures, or movies, or their own feeling states. Based on what participants can tell us, we infer something about the nature of emotion knowledge, emotional experience, or both, depending on what we think the questions assess. This last inferential step is often where the process of knowledge accumulation breaks down, because researchers do not always agree about which information participants rely upon when making judgements of emotion. The purpose of this paper is to