Prototype Analyses of Emotion Terms in Palau, Micronesia

Abstract

Psychologists have yet to arrive at a definition of emotion in the sense of identifying necessary and jointly sufficient attributes that distinguish emotions from nonemotional experiences. Fehr and Russell (1984) have suggested an explanation for the absence of such attributes, arguing that the emotions category (a) is organized around its clearest examples, or prototypes, and (b) lacks sharp boundaries. In this view, researchers as well as laypersons define emotion through recourse to examples such as happiness and anger because these concepts resemble one another, each manifesting many (though not all) of a set of features like changes in heart rate, and concern with a situation. Other concepts (e.g., awe, boredom) share these features to some degree. Thus, in the prototypical account of emotion concepts, membership in the category of emotion varies in degree as a function of the concept’s resemblance to the family of emotion prototypes; prototypes (e.g., anger, love) gradually shade into nonprototypes (e.g., greed, respect), nonprototypes into nonmembers (e.g., thinking).