Aspects of Meaning in Words Related to Happiness

Abstract

Three studies suggested by Johnson-Laird and Oatley's (1989) semantic analysis of emotion words are reported. The studies were designed to examine the semantic characteristics of words primarily related to happiness. The first study asked whether five basic emotion words and other words related to happiness or sadness implied a known cause as part of their meaning; the second asked whether happiness was superordinate to a number of related words; and the third asked whether happiness was entailed by those words. Twenty-five senior undergraduates participated in the first and second study. An additional 34 participated in study three. The first study showed differences among emotion terms in the degree to which they implied causal awareness, but the results were more consistent with a distinction between mood and reactive emotions than with Johnson-Laird and Oatley's (1989) classification. The second study showed that each of the variants of happiness was a kind of happiness, but there was more agreement that happiness was a kind of some of the variant words than is consistent with a strict hierarchy. Finally, the third study provided evidence that some, particularly intensity, variants of happiness were judged to entail happiness, but more variants were not. The results are discussed in terms of Johnson-Laird and Oatley's (1989) and other hierarchical taxonomies. Some points relevant to the further clarification of the emotion lexicon are considered.