engleski

Cognitive representation of emotions

People cognitively organize their knowledge about emotions to make sense of the richness and variety of their emotional experience. A psycholexical approach based on the examination of the relations among emotion describing words in Croatian language was adopted in order to reveal the conceptualization underlying the meaning of emotional experience. Participants were psychology students (N = 53) who were asked to judge the similarity of a representative sample of Croatian words denoting the emotion domain. Hierarchical cluster analysis and multidimensional scaling were used to analyze the collected data. The results indicated that the emotions are grouped in a smaller number of distinct clusters representing discrete emotions that can be interpreted as basic or universal, and circularly ordered along three dimensions that resemble those of Osgood’ s semantic differential (valence, arousal and potency). These main characteristics of cognitive organization of emotions in Croatian language are also confirmed for several other world languages and cultures. The present finding supports the cross-cultural comparability of cognitive representations of emotions.

psycholexical approach; knowledge representation; emotions

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