Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

An elaborate repertoire of emotions is one feature that dis-tinguishes humans from animals. Language offers a criticalform of emotion expression. However, it is unclear whetherthe meaning of an emotion word remains stable, and what fac-tors may underlie changes in emotion meaning. We hypothe-size that emotion word meanings have changed over time andthat the prototypicality of an emotion term drives this changebeyond general factors such as word frequency. We developa vector-space representation of emotion and show that thismodel replicates empirical findings on prototypicality judg-ments and basic categories of emotion. We provide evidencethat more prototypical emotion words have undergone lesschange in meaning than peripheral emotion words over the pastcentury, and that this trend holds within each family of emo-tion. Our work extends synchronic theories of emotion to itsdiachronic development and offers a computational character-ization of emotion semantics in natural language use.