Category analysis of emotion words is theory used to describe emotions; the study explains that words have been created to describe our emotions based on emotional experiences. Certain words such as love or hate can give you a distinct feeling depending on the situation.
Johnson-Laird and Oatley conducted a large analysis of 590 English words that we use to express emotion verbally and found that there are numerous ways that our emotions can be expressed.In there analysis one of there concerns is that you can not tell if the word describing the emotions is being used subjectively (Deckers, 2010). The results from there analysis allowed them to classify the words that we use to describe our emotions into five categories: anger, happy, disgust, sadness and fear. In the study the participants were placed into one of the five categories in the grouped it showed that people generally do not categorize the words we use for emotions in the same manner.One participant categorized all the words with he was given 135 of then and put them all into only two categories and labeled them as positive or negative.
As a statistical analysis it was found that people in general found there to be six categories: joy/happy, surprise, love, anger, fear, and sadness; these categories represented an emotion prototype (Deckers, 2010). As emotion prototype stands for the average or general meaning that all words have a common meaning. This analysis concluded that the five basic categories are only based on English terms (Deckers, 2010).
