Breadth of Meaning, Informativeness, and Superordination Relationships Among Selected Emotion Terms Appearing Early and Later in Development

We conducted 3 studies to investigate some of the characteristics of emotion words. Five sets of 3 emotion words were selected; each set contained 1 basic word appearing early in the developing lexicon and 2 more specific words from the same broad category of emotion appearing later in development. Basic words were hypothesized to be broader in reference, less informative, and superordinate to more specific terms in the same set (examined in Studies 1–3). Undergraduates (Ns = 36, 60, and 60, respectively) made choices on each of the 10 pairs of predictor words and on 30 comparison pairs. Results supported the hypotheses for the experimental pairs. However, the finding that similar relationships appeared between many pairs of terms for which there were no theoretical expectations casts some doubt on the interpretation.