Identifying the Eliciting Situations of Six Fundamental Emotions

We examined the capacity of human subjects to accurately identify the emotional content in verbal descriptions of various situations. Six emotions were studied: happiness, surprise, fear, disgust, anger, and sadness. Items on our questionnaire were selected by four theorists. The first study assessed the accuracy of identification of the themes and subthemes for the six emotions as well as the reliability of the study. Of the latter two studies, one dealt with the intensity rating of the emotion that was identified in each situation while the other compared the intensity ratings of the intended emotion with those of the other five emotions. The results showed satisfactory identification performances as well as good reliability. There were, however, important differences between emotions that appeared both in the percentages of correct identifications and also in intensity ratings. The data also indicated that not all themes and subthemes derived from the theorists' analysis of emotion were equally relevant to the emotions they attempted to portray. Finally, it appeared that situations in our questionnaire were often associated with more than one emotion.