ON OATLEY AND JOHNSON-LAIRDS THEORY OF EMOTION AND HIERARCHICAL STRUCTURES IN THE AFFECTIVE LEXICON

The semantic theory of emotion words recently proposed by Johnson-Lair d and Oatley (1989) was empirically investigated in three studies. In all three studies, I assessed, for different samples of German nonbasi c emotion words: (a) subjects' judgements of the conditional probabili ty of experiencing basic emotions, given the experience of nonbasic on es; and (b) their beliefs about whether it is possible to experience n onbasic emotions without also experiencing basic emotions. In Study 1, I examined the proposed semantic relations between 48 nonbasic and th eir defining basic emotion words. as well as 14 of the proposed semant ic relations among nonbasic emotion words. In Study 2, these tests wer e repeated using object-focused test sentences. In Study 3, the semant ically based relations among 12 emotions were compared to all of the n onsemantic relations existing among these emotions, and the theory was additionally tested by examining self-ascriptions of emotion words in concrete situations (hypothetical scenarios). I found that (1) the se mantic theory of emotion words proposed by Johnson-Laird and Oatley (1 989) was consistently unsupported for the disgust-derivatives, and tha t in a substantial number of cases a second nonbasic emotion was nearl y as prominent as the modal one (Study 1); (2) the conditional probabi lity and possibility relations between allegedly semantically connecte d emotion pairs were frequently no stronger or even weaker than those between semantically unconnected ones (Studies 1, 3); (3) in terms of absolute judgements, the data fell considerably short of the theoretic ally predicted results (all studies), particularly when (4) object-foc used emotion words were used (Study 2); and (5) no more favourable res ults were obtained when subjects' self-ascriptions of emotion words in concrete situations were examined (Study 3). These findings call in q uestion Johnson-Laird and Oatley's semantic theory of emotion words an d potentially also their theory of emotions.