Multidimensional scaling of emotional facial expressions: Similarity from preschoolers to adults.

Structural models of emotion represent the fact that we perceive emotions as systematically interrelated. These interrelations may reveal a basic property of the human conception of emotions, or they may represent an artifact that is due to semantic relations learned along with the emotion lexicon. The first alternative was supported by results from a series of scalings of 20 emotional facial expressions, results that could not easily be attributed to word similarity. Similarity data on the facial expressions were obtained from 30 adults and 42 preschoolers. For preschoolers, prior evidence indicates that emotion labels are not readily available; for both groups, we measured similarity without the use of emotion labels by asking subjects to group together people who appear to feel alike. The structure of emotions obtained from both children and adults was as predicted: a roughly circular order in a two-dimensional space, the axes of which could be interpreted as pleasure-displeasure and arousal-sleepiness. The form and meaning of this structure was supported through two additional scalings of the facial expressions with adults: a multidimensional scaling based on direct ratings of similarity-dissimilarity, and unidimensional scalings on the pleasuredispleasure and arousal-sleepiness dimensions.