Your words went straight to my heart: the role of emotional prototypicality in the recognition of emotion-label words

Emotional words differ in how they acquire their emotional charge. There is a relevant distinction between emotion-label words (those that directly name an emotion, e.g., “joy” or “sadness”) and emotion-laden words (those that do not name an emotion, but can provoke it, e.g., “party” or “death”). In this work, we focused on emotion-label words. These words vary in their emotional prototypicality, which indicates the extent to which the word refers to an emotion. We conducted two lexical decision experiments to examine the role played by emotional prototypicality in the recognition of emotion-label words. The results showed that emotional prototypicality has a facilitative effect in word recognition. Emotional prototypicality would ease conceptual access, thus facilitating the retrieval of emotional content during word recognition. In addition to the theoretical implications, the evidence gathered in this study also highlights the need to consider emotional prototypicality in the selection of emotion-label words in future studies.