From meaning to experience: the dimensional structure of emotional experiences

In this chapter, it is investigated to what extent the psycholinguistic results of the GRID can be generalized to the actual emotional experiences of people. In the present study a sample of adults reported on the most intense emotional episode of the day, freely labeled these episodes with three emotion terms, and then rated to what extent 137 GRID features described their emotional experience. For the 95 most reported terms the average empirical feature profile was computed and analyzed in exactly the same way as the GRID data. A very comparable four-dimensional valence, power, arousal, and novelty structure was identified for the emotional experiences. The results clearly indicate that the findings with the GRID instrument are not only relevant for (psycho)linguistic approaches, but also interesting for the study of actual emotion episodes.

ISBN:9780199592746

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