Situational knowledge and emotions

Abstract

Knowledge of situations in which various emotions might typically be experienced was investigated. An initial series of experiments collected normative data concerning groupings of emotions, general situational information and specific “scripts” for emotional experiences. A further series of experiments employed primed word recognition (lexical decision, naming) and an image generation task in which subjects were primed with emotion words or situational information. Strong priming effects were observed from situational information to emotion words. These findings suggested that situational information relating to emotions may be organised in a hierarchy in which personal memories of emotional experiences, “scripts” of emotional experiences general emotion situation information, and conceptual knowledge of emotions are closely interrelated. The implications of this hierarchical organisation for the representation of emotional knowledge in memory are discussed.