Ferré, Guasch, Stadthagen-González, Hinojosa, Fraga, Marín & Pérez-Sánchez (2024) — What makes a word a good representative of the category “emotion”?
A psycholinguistic normative study that arrives at this wiki from an unexpected direction and answers a question none of its other sources ask: what do ordinary speakers mean by “emotion”?
651 Spanish speakers rated all 1,286 words from the Pérez-Sánchez et al. (2021) Emopro database on nine variables (at least 20 raters per word per variable), five of them chosen to operationalize the five components of the multicomponential consensus — evaluation (appraisal), action (action tendency), body expression, interoception (internal body sensations), and feeling — and four chosen from the concreteness/abstractness literature (sensory experience, social interaction, thought, morality). Those ratings were regressed onto the database’s existing emotion prototypicality scores: how strongly each word “refers to an emotion,” from anger (high) to boredom (low). See emotion-word-rating-norms, emotion-prototypicality.
The instruction that matters is one sentence long: “Rate whether the word is related to internal body sensations.” That is the whole interoception manipulation, and it carries the paper.
The result
Five components went in. Two came out.
| component | variable | partial r with prototypicality | beta |
|---|---|---|---|
| feeling | feeling | .408 | .494 |
| physiological reaction | interoception | .340 | .363 |
| — | thought | .140 | .123 |
| appraisal | evaluation | −.044 (ns) | −.119 |
| action tendency | action | −.076 | −.064 |
| body expression | body expression | −.034 (ns) | dropped |
The stepwise model reached R² = .582, and the order of entry tells a different story than the betas: interoception went in first and took .417 of the variance by itself — more than everything else combined. Feeling added .105 on top. The abstract names feeling first because its standardized beta is larger; the variance decomposition names interoception first. Both are in the paper and they are not in conflict, but the wiki should hold the stronger version: the single best predictor of whether a Spanish speaker thinks a word names an emotion is whether they think it names something felt inside the body.
What did not predict emotionhood is as interesting. Body expression — the face, the voice, the posture, the entire Ekman evidence base — contributes nothing once feeling and interoception are in the model. Action tendency is a small negative predictor. Evaluation, the appraisal component, is negative too. Words like respeto (respect, high evaluation), impulso (impulse, high action) and pereza (laziness, high body expression) are simply not good examples of emotions to the people who use the word.
Why this belongs in an interoception wiki
Three things, in ascending order of consequence.
1. Independent convergence on interoception as the modality of emotion. Connell, Lynott & Banks (2018) — a different lab, a different language, a different question (the perceptual grounding of abstract concepts) — found that interoception ratings outranked hearing, taste, touch, smell and vision in distinguishing emotion words from nonemotion words, with the pattern reversed for concrete words. Ferré et al. reproduce that from the prototypicality side. Two independent routes to the claim that interoception is the sensory modality of the emotion concept, which is a stronger position than either paper alone.
2. It gives what-should-emotion-terms-refer-to its first usage data. LeDoux’s argument for reserving “emotion” for feelings is sociological: common sense identifies emotions with feelings so firmly that any other usage will be misread. Scarantino replies that common sense is “all over the map” — folk psychology routinely treats emotions as motive causes (“Maria slapped Lucas because she was angry”) — and the wiki’s debate page notes that this reply is offered without usage data. Here is usage data, and it does not favour Scarantino: feeling is the top predictor, action is negative, and the folk category tracks LeDoux’s explanandum rather than Scarantino’s. See that page for what this does and does not settle — reply (2), that common sense should not legislate scientific definitions, is untouched, and it was always the strongest of the three.
3. It sharpens the word-cue objection to bodily-sensation-maps — and cuts both ways doing it. This is the finding with the most leverage and the one that needs the most care.
The word-cue objection, sharpened in both directions
emBODY’s central interpretive risk is that showing someone an emotion word and asking where they feel it may tap shared concepts rather than shared bodily experience (cultural-universality-of-emotion). Ferré et al. establish, without intending to, that the Spanish concept of emotion is constituted in part by interoceptive content — being about internal body sensations is most of what makes a word an emotion word at all.
That fact is genuinely bidirectional, and the wiki should not pretend otherwise:
- The constructionist reading. If bodily content is baked into the concept, then a subject cued with an emotion word already has an interoceptive expectation supplied by the lexicon before any introspection occurs. Cross-cultural concordance of word-cued maps is then doubly overdetermined by shared conceptual knowledge, and the objection on embody gets stronger rather than weaker.
- The Nummenmaa reading. Concepts have to come from somewhere. The most natural explanation for why the folk concept of emotion is interoceptive is that emotions are felt in the body, and the lexicon has recorded that fact. On this reading Ferré et al. is a semantic fossil of exactly the bodily experience Volynets et al. measure directly. Ferré et al. themselves lean here, citing Nummenmaa’s programme approvingly.
Nothing in this paper adjudicates between them — it is a rating study and cannot. But it does move the burden: the word-cue objection can no longer be waved off as an abstract possibility, because the semantic content it postulates has now been measured, and it is large. Recorded on embody and cultural-universality-of-emotion.
Note the one thing that does help Nummenmaa here, from elsewhere in the wiki: Lyons et al. (2021) found BSMs fracture by diagnosis, and shared lexical knowledge should not do that. The Spanish lexicon does not know who is medicated.
Against core affect, mildly
A smaller result with a target. Core affect holds that feeling is valence plus arousal. If that were right, the feeling ratings here should be largely recoverable from the valence and arousal norms — and they are not: feeling’s partial correlation with valence was nonsignificant (−.043) and with arousal only −.11. The authors read this as evidence that feeling is not reducible to the two dimensions.
Two cautions the paper does not raise. These are partial correlations controlling for every other variable including evaluation, which correlates .712 with valence — a live suppression risk. And a null partial correlation between feeling and valence is not obviously what a constructionist would predict anyway: core affect is valence and arousal jointly, and “feeling” ratings collapsed across the whole lexicon would be expected to be orthogonal to polarity, since sadness and joy are both intensely felt. The result is suggestive against the reduction, not decisive, and the EFA arguably says more: prototypicality loads .760 on emotional experience and not at all on socioemotional polarity, so whatever makes a word an emotion is nearly independent of whether it is a good or bad one.
Two defects in the source, flagged not propagated
The morality coefficient is misread by its own discussion. Table 4 reports morality at beta = −.137 — controlling for everything else, more moral content makes a word less prototypically emotional. The discussion states the reverse: “it is more probable that an abstract word refers to an emotion when it has to do with mental activities, judgments, and moral rules.” That sentence is true of thought (beta = .123) and false of morality, which it bundles in. The wiki records morality as a negative predictor, per the table.
Table 4’s thought row is internally inconsistent: beta = .123 with t = −4.915. Since the partial correlation of thought with prototypicality is +.140 and the discussion treats thought as a positive contributor, the negative t is the misprint. Minor, but this is the second APA-journal table in this folder with a sign/transposition error — compare the verified transposition in lyons-2021-body-maps-depression.
The reliability problem nobody flags
The most serious internal weakness is not in the tables but in the validity section, and the authors pass over it without comment.
Every variable’s reliability was checked by correlating control-word means across questionnaire versions. Eight of nine variables landed between r(22) = .824 and .955. Interoception came in at .654 — the lowest by a wide margin, and the only one below .8. The men/women agreement correlation tells the same story (interoception .463; evaluation .755). Its ICC is respectable (.80), so this is not a fatal objection, but the pattern is consistent: raters agree least about interoception, and interoception is the variable the paper’s title, abstract and headline R² all rest on.
There is a charitable reading that is also more interesting than a complaint. Low inter-rater agreement about which words are “related to internal body sensations” is what you would expect if interoceptive experience genuinely varies between people — which is the premise of the entire individual-differences literature on interoceptive-sensitivity and the interoceptive-taxonomy. The noise may be the signal. But the paper does not make that argument, and a variable that raters agree on least explaining variance best is a combination that deserves stating out loud.