Emotion prototypicality
Applied to emotion by Ortony, Clore & Foss (1987) and Shaver et al. (1987) out of Rosch’s (1978) prototype theory: category membership is graded, not binary. Just as a robin is a better bird than a penguin, anger is a better emotion than boredom. Ask people to rate “to what extent does this word refer to an emotion” and the answers spread across the whole scale rather than splitting cleanly in two.
The measure is old and stable. What Ferré et al. (2024) add is what the judgment is made of.
What makes a word emotional
Prior work asked the question with affective variables only, and got affective answers: emotional charge (Zammuner 1998, in Italian), intensity (Niedenthal et al. 2004, in French), emotional charge again plus discrete-emotion relatedness and arousal (Pérez-Sánchez et al. 2021, in Spanish). The consensus summary was that prototypical emotion words denote an intense affective experience regardless of polarity — true, but close to circular, since “emotional charge” is barely a decomposition of “emotionness.”
Ferré et al. broke the judgment into the five components of the multicomponential consensus (appraisal, action tendency, body expression, physiological reaction, feeling) and asked which ones speakers are actually consulting. Two of five survive:
| component | verdict |
|---|---|
| feeling (subjective experience) | strongest predictor (beta .494) |
| interoception (internal body sensations) | largest variance share (R² increment .417) |
| appraisal (evaluation) | negative (beta −.119) |
| action tendency | negative (beta −.064) |
| body expression | drops out of the model |
The folk concept of emotion is a felt, interoceptive concept. It is not an expressive concept, not a motivational concept, and not an appraisal concept — a striking result given that appraisal, expression and action tendency are where three of the field’s major research traditions have concentrated.
Why a wiki about interoception cares
Because prototypicality is a property of words, and this wiki’s central empirical instrument cues people with words.
The bodily-sensation-maps programme shows subjects an emotion word and asks where they feel it. Its standing objection is that the answer may come from shared conceptual knowledge rather than shared bodily experience (see embody, cultural-universality-of-emotion). Ferré et al. establish that the concept has substantial interoceptive content built into it — so a word cue is not a neutral pointer at an experience, it is a token of a category that is partly defined by where it is felt.
That does not settle the objection, and it can be read in either direction: concepts may be interoceptive because bodies are, or reports may be interoceptive because concepts are. Both readings are recorded on ferre-2024-emotion-prototypicality. The contribution here is that the semantic content the objection postulates is no longer hypothetical — it has been measured, and it is large.
The structure of the lexicon
The same ratings produce a two-factor space (interfactor r = .186, effectively independent):
- Socioemotional polarity — evaluation (.938), valence (.886), morality (.872), social interaction (.578). Whether the thing is good or bad.
- Emotional experience — interoception (.768), feeling (.762), prototypicality (.760), sensory experience (.679), body expression (.639). Whether it is an emotion at all.
Prototypicality lives entirely in the second. Being an emotion and being a good or bad one are orthogonal properties — infelicidad (unhappiness) and felicidad (happiness) sit at opposite ends of polarity and equally high on experience.
Two further features of the space:
- No clusters. The 1,283 words scatter continuously and roughly circularly. There is no discrete structure in the emotion lexicon at this resolution — a point worth holding against the discreteness claims on basic-emotions, though a semantic space is not a claim about emotions themselves.
- Negative words dominate, and positive words are more homogeneous. Consistent with Schrauf & Sanchez (2004). The proposed explanation (Schwarz 1990) is that negative experience signals a problem and triggers differentiating analysis, while positive experience signals safety and does not — so the negative lexicon gets finer labels. Compare the same asymmetry appearing topographically in volynets-2020-cultural-universality.
A caution on scope
Everything above is Spanish, rated by Spanish university students. Prototypicality studies exist in Italian, French, Basque, English and Indonesian, and the variables driving prototypicality have only been decomposed this way once, in one language. Whether “the folk concept of emotion is interoceptive” is a fact about people or a fact about Spanish is untested — and it is precisely the kind of claim cultural-universality-of-emotion exists to be careful about.