Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Although work on conceptual knowledge has recently begun addressing the nature of abstract semantic representations,relatively little remains known about the structure of our knowledge of emotion concepts, an important subset of abstractconcepts. Property generationa common paradigm used to elaborate the featural representations of concepts that arecomponents of many models of semantic memoryhas been used extensively with concrete nouns, but in a limited numberof studies investigating abstract concepts. No prior work, to our knowledge, has systematically investigated the process ofproperty generation specifically for emotion concepts. In the present study, participants performed a property generationtask in which they listed features of emotion concepts and a matching number of concrete and abstract, non-emotionconcepts. Our results are interpreted with an emphasis on the distinction between emotion concepts and other abstractconcepts, which differ in the distribution of features generated.