EMCAT-POL: A catalogue of 817 basic emotion terms in Polish

Abstract

Abstract This paper investigates the lexicalizations of prototypical basic emotion concepts in Polish. A catalogue of all words denoting basic emotions (anger, disgust, fear, sadness, surprise, joy) in Polish has been created to qualitatively and quantitatively explore the lexicalizations and to draw an ethnopsychological profile of Poles. The catalogue contains basic emotion terms and their synonyms in noun, verb, and adjective forms, as well as data pertaining to grammatical gender and word frequency. A quantitative and qualitative exploratory analysis of the catalogued data was conducted to determine which of the six basic emotion concepts are lexicalized most richly and completely, and which types of emotion terms are used most frequently. The results indicate that in Polish emotions are preferentially expressed as nouns, even though they are more frequently lexicalized as adjectives. There are also more words for negative emotions than for positive ones (negative differentiation effect), though the positive emotion words are used more frequently than all the negative words combined (Pollyanna effect). Polish also shows a marked preference for overtly verbalizing the neutral emotion of surprise – the smallest category by number of words denoting the emotion. Implications of the results for psychotherapy and bilingualism studies are discussed.