This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: How similar are "joy" and "surprise"? Conversely, how far apart are "joy" and "sadness"?
We naturally organize words that express emotions—such as "happy," "afraid," and "angry"—according to similarities and differences in their meanings. However, investigating this entire structure using human participants alone is not easy because the number of comparisons rises rapidly as more emotion terms are included. Specially Appointed Assistant Professor Ke Han and Associate Professor Eiji Watanabe of the Laboratory of Neurophysiology, National Institute for Basic Biology (NIBB), investigated the semantic organization of emotion terms by asking GPT-4 to arrange the terms in a spatial layout and comparing the results with human judgments.
The results showed that prompting GPT-4 with a task in ordinary language reproduced a structure closely resembling the arrangements made by human participants. Moreover, when the vocabulary was expanded to 99 terms, a structure related to emotional intensity, or arousal, emerged that had been difficult to detect using only a small number of emotion terms. These research findings were published in Scientific Reports.
Emotions can be divided into categories such as joy, anger and sadness. In psychology, however, emotions can also be represented as positions along several continuous dimensions. Three representative dimensions are: For example, "excitement" and "serenity" are both relatively pleasant emotions, but they differ greatly in arousal.
Likewise, "rage" and "sadness" are both unpleasant emotions, yet they also differ in arousal. Such emotional structures have traditionally been studied mainly by asking people to rate how similar emotion terms are to one another. However, experiments that comprehensively compare large numbers of emotion terms place a heavy burden on participants.
The research team developed a task in which three emotion terms were placed simultaneously on a grid displayed on a screen. For example, when the words "joy," "surprise" and "sadness" were presented, terms judged to be similar in meaning were placed close together, whereas terms judged to be different were placed farther apart. Placing three terms at once made it possible to express three relationships—joy–surprise, joy–sadness and surprise–sadness—in a single trial.
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