Levels of correspondence between individual verbalized constructs and definitions in lexicographic sources

The paper presents a methodological approach to the study of encoded units of knowledge about experienced emotions in the thinking of respondents, divided by gender. The work analyzes and describes the stages of an experimental study of subjects’ responses to tasks on the everyday understanding of the emotions of surprise and joy, as well as to stimulus situations from the experience of these emotions. The study aims to identify levels of correspondence between linguistic representations of encoded knowledge about experienced emotions of surprise and joy in subjects, stimulus situations that provoked the occurrence of these emotions in past experience, and lexicographic descriptions of definitions close in semantic features. The work is novel in that it is the first one to establish levels of correspondence between the verbalized everyday emotional experience of subjects of different genders and the academic description of identical definitions in lexicographic sources. In addition, for the first time, linguistic constructs united by the main semantic features, which are encoded as units of knowledge about experienced emotions of surprise and joy as two related emotions, are considered. The results led to the need to divide the data obtained according to the level of correspondence between descriptions of understanding emotions and stimulus situations that contribute to the encoding of the studied emotions, as well as between the nominations of emotions activated in everyday consciousness and descriptions in lexicographic sources. Levels of correspondence were identified in the construct: full, high, medium, low, and absence of correspondence. In the sample (n = 114), 89.28% and 14.29% of the medium level of correspondence in constructs with included semantic features of emotions of surprise and joy, respectively, were established by young men (n = 56). Young women (n = 58) showed 75.86% and 20.69% (surprise and joy, respectively), which corresponds to the medium level. The level of full correspondence in the construct, marked by the presence of semantic features of the emotion of surprise, was also noted (3.45%).