Abstract

The present study explored the structure of emotion from the experiences of emotional cooccurrence. 1517 emotion-related terms were first gathered from the subject's free-responses, Korean dictionary, and previous studies on the emotion structure. Then, 818 terms judged as being more appropriate by current investigators were selected. Finally, 80 emotional terms were selected based on subjects' ratings in terms of similarity, categorical inclusiveness and representativeness. 300 subjects were asked to rate the degree to which pairwise emotional terms are experienced cooccurrentIy in order to obtain input data for cluster analysis and MDS(ALSCAL). Results from cluster analysis indicated that the emotional structure consists of pleasantness and unpleasantness clusters and that the unpleasantness cluster was more differentiated than the pleasantness cluster. MDS on 80 emotional terms revealed the following three dimensions on the 11% stress level : (1) Pleasantness-Unpleasantness, (2) Activation, and (3) Tension-Relaxation.