This article reports the results of studies intended to explore further the semantic relations among English terms related to emotional states. The intent was to develop a hierarchical model of semantically homogeneous groups of terms, the features denning each group, and distinguishing characteristics of closely related groups. The research was conducted in two phases. In the first phase, hierarchical clustering was the primary method used to identify a preliminary organization. In the second phase, four highly educated speakers of English, sensitive to fine verbal distinctions, agreed on the classification of a larger set of terms, using the groups identified in the first phase as a starting point. The judges also attempted to specify the features differentiating groups at each level of the hierarchy. Comparisons with other descriptions of the emotional domain and possible uses of the taxonomy are discussed.

This study explored the role of semantic structure within the domain of animal terms in children's and adults' spontaneous operations on these terms. Twenty-four subjects at each of six educational levels were given four tasks. Freelisting of animal terms and animal associations to animal words showed similar semantic structures across all educational levels, including doctoral students in zoology, with a few strongly associated terms, and a large group of fairly isolated terms. Sorting of animal terms and ratings of animal pair dissimilarities yielded a dominant dimension of size for grades seven, eleven, and undergraduate groups. The dominant dimension for zoologists, however, was based on food habits. The implications of these results for the development of semantic structures are discussed.

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Three studies were conducted to determine some aspects of the semantic structure of words referring to positive interpersonal affect. Two studies determined dimensions of difference and families of related words on the basis of the target persons associated with each. These results were compared with those from sorting on the basis of overall similarity of meaning. There was close agreement among the three studies, using different samples of words, indices of similarity, and judges. The relation of the similarity structure of the words to the dimensions of affective experience and to discrete, basic, emotion is discussed.

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