The Lexical Approach to the Taxonomy of Emotions

Abstract

The first attempts to create a taxonomy of emotions were made before the psychology has become an official field of science. Over the centuries, scientists have attempted to reach a taxonomy consensus of emotions, however, unsuccessfully. Despite the relative agreement in the division of emotions into basic and complex, no agreement on applied criteria was reached. It leads to a significant discrepancy in the published lists of basic emotions. Furthermore, subsequent attempts at the taxonomy of emotions, despite their increasing detail, have also not led to any solution that could be considered as consensus. The article discusses selected, current ways of classifying emotions and presents an alternative way to unify the taxonomy of emotions. It could be done by looking at the emotions as an individual difference. It is possible, among others, on the grounds of an evolutionary approach. The taxonomic potential of the lexical approach in the systematization of individual differences has never been used in the area of emotion classification despite the fact that psycholexical approach helped to achieve relative consensus, for example, in personality psychology. The article discusses the most important problems to solve in order to identify culturally universal emotions, based on natural languages.