Knowledge of Sadness: Emotion-related behavioral words differently encode loss and failure sadness

Abstract

Knowledge of emotion enables recognition of one’s specific emotional states, such as sadness. Although different sadness subtypes evoke different automatic psychophysiological responses, it is unclear whether they are internalized as different concepts. Two experiments were conducted to examine the properties of sadness concepts. We hypothesized that sadness subtypes are internalized as different concepts based on distinguishing features related to crying manner, which construct knowledge of emotion. Study 1 used crying-related onomatopoeias and emotional contexts in a contextual congruency test. The 70 participants rated the congruity of 32 onomatopoeias for loss and failure contexts. The onomatopoeias were divided into high-, middle-, and low-fitting groups based on word-pair correlations. In the middle-fitting group, more highly congruent words for each context were mixed. Based on these findings, we additionally hypothesized one of the distinguishing features for each sadness was related to behavioral activation properties of crying. Study 2 asked 22 participants to perform a verbal acceptability judgment test. As predicted, these properties distinguished between the two types of sadness. Loss-sadness was associated with static features, while failure-sadness was linked to dynamic and voice properties. These findings indicate loss- and failure-sadness are internalized as distinct concepts based on the differences at least in behavioral activation features.

Appendices

Appendix 1

Table 5 Gender comparison of the congruency rating for 64 sentential stimuli [32 words×loss (A) and failure (B) contexts]. A) shows the results of the loss-context, B) shows the results of the failure-context. Significance α level corrected is p = 0.00078 (0.05/64)

Appendix 2

Table 6 Gender comparisons of the congruency rating of the four properties for the loss and failure contexts