Concept of emotion viewed from a prototype perspective.

TLDR

Emotion has resisted a universally accepted definition, raising doubts about the feasibility of a classical, necessary‑and‑sufficient framework and prompting questions about prototype analysis and the distinction between folk and scientific concepts. The authors investigate whether emotion is better conceptualized as a prototype with graded membership and fuzzy boundaries rather than as a classical all‑or‑none category. Seven studies examined prototype membership, measuring internal structure and boundary fuzziness, and discussed the implications for emotion psychology. Results show that emotion categories possess an internal structure that can be ranked by prototypicality, predict various cognitive judgments, and that the concept lacks sharp boundaries, distinguishing it from classically defined concepts.

Abstract

SUMMARY Many have sought but no one has found a commonly acceptable definition for the concept of emotion. Repeated failure raises the question whether a definition is possible, at least a definition in the classical sense of individually necessary and jointly sufficient attributes. A series of seven studies explored an alternative possibility that the concept of emotion is better understood from a prototype perspective than from a classical perspective. Specifically it is argued that membership in the concept of emotion is a matter of degree rather than all-or-none (that the concept has an internal structure) and that no sharp boundary separates members from nonmembers (that the concept has fuzzy boundaries). As hypothesized, the concept of emotion has an internal structure: happiness, love, anger, fear, awe, respect, envy, and other types of emotion can be reliably ordered from better to poorer examples of emotion. In turn, an emotion's goodness of example (prototypicality) ranking was found to predict how readily incomes to mind when one is asked to list emotions, how likely it is to be labeled as an emotion when one is asked what sort of thing it is, how readily it can be substituted for the word emotion in sentences without their sounding unnatural, and the degree to which it resembles other emotion categories in terms of shared features. In response to an argument made by Armstrong, Gleitman and Gleitman (1983), the evidence for internal structure is acknowledged not to imply fuzzy boundaries. Thus, it was further shown that the concept of emotion, and several other of Rosch's prototypically organized concepts, lacks sharp boundaries and thus can be empirically distinguished from classically defined concepts: Peripheral members of classical concepts but not of fuzzy concepts are nonetheless unequivocal members of the concept. Finally, implications of a prototype view for the psychology, of emotion are discussed. Issues raised include extension of the prototype analysis to anger, fear, and other types of emotion; scientific versus everyday folk concepts; and emotion concepts versus emotion events.