Leonid I. Perlovsky

Sergey Petrov, Jose F. Fontanari, Leonid I. Perlovsky

The categorization of emotion names, i.e., the grouping of emotion words that have similar emotional connotations together, is a key tool of Social Psychology used to explore people's knowledge about emotions. Without exception, the studies following that research line were based on the gauging of the perceived similarity between emotion names by the participants of the experiments. Here we propose and examine a new approach to study the categories of emotion names - the similarities between target emotion names are obtained by comparing the contexts in which they appear in texts retrieved from the World Wide Web. This comparison does not account for any explicit semantic information; it simply counts the number of common words or lexical items used in the contexts. This procedure allows us to write the entries of the similarity matrix as dot products in a linear vector space of contexts. The properties of this matrix were then explored using Multidimensional Scaling Analysis and Hierarchical Clustering. Our main findings, namely, the underlying dimension of the emotion space and the categories of emotion names, were consistent with those based on people's judgments of emotion names similarities.

Jose F. Fontanari, Marie-Claude Bonniot-Cabanac, Michel Cabanac et al.

Cognitive dissonance is the stress that comes from holding two conflicting thoughts simultaneously in the mind, usually arising when people are asked to choose between two detrimental or two beneficial options. In view of the well-established role of emotions in decision making, here we investigate whether the conventional structural models used to represent the relationships among basic emotions, such as the Circumplex model of affect, can describe the emotions of cognitive dissonance as well. We presented a questionnaire to 34 anonymous participants, where each question described a decision to be made among two conflicting motivations and asked the participants to rate analogically the pleasantness and the intensity of the experienced emotion. We found that the results were compatible with the predictions of the Circumplex model for basic emotions.