ASPECTS OF MEANING IN WORDS RELATED TO HAPPINESS

Three studies suggested by Johnson-Laird and Oatley's (1989) semantic analysis of emotion words are reported. The studies were designed to e xamine the semantic characteristics of words primarily related to happ iness. The first study asked whether five basic emotion words and othe r words related to happiness or sadness implied a known cause as' part of their meaning; the second asked whether happiness was superordinat e to a number of related words; and the third asked whether happiness was entailed by those words. Twenty-five senior undergraduates partici pated in the first and second study. An additional 34 participated in study three. The first study showed differences among emotion terms in the degree to which they implied causal awareness, but the results we re more consistent with a distinction between mood and reactive emotio ns than with Johnson-Laird and Oatley's (1989) classification. The sec ond study showed that each of the variants of happiness was a kind of happiness, but there was more agreement that happiness was a kind of s ome of the variant words than is consistent with a strict hierarchy. F inally, the third study provided evidence that some, particularly inte nsity, variants of happiness were judged to entail happiness, but more variants were not. The results are discussed in terms of Johnson-Lair d and Oatley's (1989) and other hierarchical taxonomies. Some points r elevant to the further clarification of the emotion lexicon are consid ered.