Concept of Emotion Viewed From a Prototype Perspective

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.