Conceptual structure of emotions

We rely on emotion concepts, an important subset of our conceptual space, to distinguish between a wide array of internal states. A sizable body of work debating the manner in which this space is divided-as well as an array of studies reporting the influence of emotions on attention, decision making, language comprehension, and other cognitive processes- demonstrate that interest in this area is active. However, the underlying structure of emotion concepts has received considerably less attention. Theories of conceptual knowledge have traditionally prioritized the examination of concrete concepts pertaining to inanimate objects and natural kinds (e.g., plants, birds, vehicles). As a result, accounts of the conceptual representation of emotions have almost exclusively focused on their abstract nature. In contrast, in the present study we hypothesized that differences between the experience of emotions and the experience of other abstract concepts (e.g. equality, tyranny), specifically regarding the relative importance of interoceptive states, might drive distinctions in the dimensions along which emotion concepts are represented. Participants performed a property generation task in which they listed features of emotion concepts and a matching number of concrete and abstract, non-emotion concepts. Features were coded into categories derived from the literature. Analysis revealed a statistically significant difference in the distribution of features among the category types by condition (i.e., emotion, abstract, and concrete). Our results reflect subtle differences between the structure of emotion concepts and the structure of, not only concrete concepts, but also other abstract concepts. These findings contribute to our understanding of emotional conceptual representations and their role in cognition and memory.