Cognitive Processes Involved in Similarity Judgments of Emotions

This article challenges the prevailing, semantic view of the cognitive processes underlying similarity judgments of emotions, which assumes that these judgments are based on a property comparison process. An alternative view is proposed, according to which judgments of emotion similarity reflect impressions of the degree of co-occurrence of emotions in everyday life. This episodic model of similarity judgments was compared in 2 studies with the main existing elaborations of the semantic view, the dimensional model and the feature model. Results were best in line with the episodic model. Study 1 revealed asymmetries in directional similarity judgments that were systematically related to episodic information (i.e., the frequency of emotions) but unrelated to semantic information (i.e., number of features of the emotion concepts). Study 2 replicated the central findings of Study 1 and showed that they held good at the level of individual participants. Findings add to other recent evidence supporting the episodic model of similarity judgments of emotions.