Cited by 3,072Emotions and Moral BehaviorPersonality Traits and PsychologySocial and Intergroup Psychology

Emotion knowledge: further exploration of a prototype approach

Shaver, Phillip, Schwartz, Judith, Kirson, Donald, O'Connor, Cary·1987·Journal of Personality and Social Psychology

Abstract

Recent work on natural categories suggests a framework for conceptualizing people's knowledge about emotions. Categories of natural objects or events, including emotions, are formed as a result of repeated experiences and become organized around prototypes (Rosch, 1978); the interrelated set of emotion categories becomes organized within an abstract-to-concrete hierarchy. At the basic level of the emotion hierarchy one finds the handful of concepts (love, joy, anger, sadness, fear, and perhaps, surprise) most useful for making everyday distinctions among emotions, and these overlap substantially with the examples mentioned most readily when people are asked to name emotions (Fehr & Russell, 1984), with the emotions children learn to name first (Bretherton & Beeghly, 1982), and with what theorists have called basic or primary emotions. This article reports two studies, one exploring the hierarchical organization of emotion concepts and one specifying the prototypes, or scripts, of five basic emotions, and it shows how the prototype approach might be used in the future to investigate the processing of information about emotional events, cross-cultural differences in emotion concepts, and the development of emotion knowledge.

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Crossref · 10.1037/0022-3514.52.6.1061

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Authors
Shaver, P., Schwartz, J., Kirson, D., & O'Connor, C.
Venue
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
Published
1987
Volume
52
Issue
6
Pages
1061-1086
ISSN
  • 0022-3514 (ISSN-L)
  • 1939-1315
OpenAlex
W4256441345
Cited by
3,072
References
0
Citations by year
2026: 96 · 2025: 119 · 2024: 146 · 2023: 173 · 2022: 129 · 2021: 144 · 2020: 147 · 2019: 184 · 2018: 126 · 2017: 116 · 2016: 116 · 2015: 119 · 2014: 121 · 2013: 95 · 2012: 111
FWCI
33.74
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
closed
Locations
  • Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (publishedVersion)
  • PubMed (publishedVersion)
Funders
National Institute of Mental Health (MH39298)
Topics
  • Social Sciences › Psychology › Social Psychology › Emotions and Moral Behavior
  • Social Sciences › Psychology › Clinical Psychology › Personality Traits and Psychology
  • Social Sciences › Sociology and Political Science › Social and Intergroup Psychology
Keywords
emotional understanding, prototype approach, emotion concepts, emotion cognition
MeSH terms
Adult, Arousal, Concept Formation, Emotions, Female, Humans, Male, Semantics, Set, Psychology

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