The global meaning structure of the emotion domain: investigating the complementarity of multiple perspectives on meaning

The hypotheses about the overall structure of the emotion domain as proposed by the three main theoretical approaches in psychology is investigated. As predicted by the componential emotion approach, it is found that features from all emotion components contribute universally to the meaning of emotion terms. The prediction of the dimensional approach that emotion information can be represented adequately by a low-dimensional structure is confirmed. The four dimensions of valence, power, arousal, and novelty emerge in that order of importance. A categorical representation of the data revealed the four major basic clusters of joy, sadness, fear, and anger and two smaller clusters of surprise and compassion. Moreover, it is observed that 82.1% of the emotion terms across the 34 samples could be correctly classified in one of the 24 a priori emotion term categories on the basis of their feature profiles