COGNITIVE-PROCESSES INVOLVED IN SIMILARITY JUDGMENTS OF EMOTIONS

This article challenges the prevailing, semantic view of the cognitive processes underlying similarity judgments of emotions, which assumes that these judgments are based on a property comparison process. An al ternative view is proposed, according to which judgments of emotion si milarity reflect impressions of the degree of co-occurrence of emotion s in everyday life. This episodic model of similarity judgments was co mpared in 2 studies with the main existing elaborations of the semanti c view, the dimensional model and the feature model. Results were best in line with the episodic model. Study 1 revealed asymmetries in dire ctional similarity judgments that were systematically related to episo dic information (i.e., the frequency of emotions) but unrelated to sem antic information (i.e., number of features of the emotion concepts). Study 2 replicated the central findings of Study 1 and showed that, th ey held good at the level of individual participants. Findings add to other recent evidence supporting the episodic model of similarity judg ments of emotions.