Presented at the 19th International Congress of the International Association for Cross-Cultural Psychology
Bremen, Germany, July 27–31 July 2008

Older work based on similarity sorting of emotion terms has repeatedly revealed the three dimensions of evaluation/pleasantness, power/dominance, and activation/arousal in the meaning structure of emotion terms. The GRID project constitutes a novel approach to the study of the emotion space, by studying the covariance of emotion features (selected from the componential theory of emotion) across emotion terms (words). A robust four-dimensional solution seems to emerge cross-linguistically, which includes the three aforementioned dimensions plus an unpredictability dimension, thus lending support to the componential/ dimensional approach. Here we present data from a Greek student sample evaluating the 24 standard emotion terms of the GRID instrument on 144 features across six domains (appraisal, physical symptoms, expressions, action tendencies, feelings, and regulation). We compare the resulting factor structure to the findings from other linguistic-cultural groups. In addition, we explore the meanings of some Modern Greek emotion terms that are not readily rendered cross-linguistically (e.g. into English). Specifically, we examine the meaning of “emotion” (as in “being emotional,” “moved,” or “touched”), the semantic characteristics of which seem to include ambiguities (e.g., in valence) that have not been previously analyzed. In addition, we seek to locate romantic love and a state of anticipatory suspense (the Modern Greek meanings of “eros” and “agony,” respectively) within the four-dimensional GRID space, and discuss the implications for further semantic analyses of these terms in Greek.