A Dictionary of Affect in Language: V. What is An Emotion?

Subjects in three experiments gave their opinions as to the emotional meaning of various words in terms of categorical inclusion as an emotion (yes, no), a rating scale of emotional impact, and frequency of citation in an open-ended emotion-naming task. Subjects' responses were correlated with several scores based on the Dictionary of Affect. A word was more likely to be called an emotion or rated highly on emotional impact when it had a high value of Arousal and a high or low value for Pleasantness. In two of the three experiments, distance from the origin in Evaluation-Activation space was also a significant predictor of responding. Correlations supporting these conclusions ranged from low to medium magnitude.