ABSTRACT
Concern with the nature of the subjective dimensions of emotions goes back to the beginning of experimental psychology. Wilhelm Wundt, the founder of experimental psychology, devoted a lengthy treatment to feelings in his textbook on physiological psychology (1905). He argued for three major dimensions of feeling states, Lustl Unlust (pleasantness/unpleasantness), Erregung/Beruhigung (activation/relaxation), and Spannung/ Lösung (tension/relief). Many psychologists following Wundt have agreed that a dimensional system seems to be a useful tool in the attempt to provide a taxonomy of the emotions. In many cases researchers have used the lexicon of emotion labels in different languages to try to dimensionalize the semantic space formed by these labels (see summary reviews by Fillenbaum & Rapoport, 1971, p. 100ff.; Schmidt-Atzert, 1981, p. 37ff; Smith & Ellsworth, 1985; Traxel & Heide, 1961). All of the studies that have been done show that it is easily possible to construct a dimensional space to order the linguistic emotion terms, generally consisting of two to four dimensions. Furthermore, the nature of the dimensions has been similar across studies and bears a striking resemblance to the dimensions that keep appearing in studies using the semantic differential (Ertel, 1964; Osgood, Suci, & Tannenbaum, 1957). In general, one has little difficulty in identifying a hedonic valence and an activity factor. The third factor, while not always clearly potency, often can be interpreted in a similar way (see also Averill, 1975; Bottenberg, 1972; Bush, 1973).
