Junior High School Students Emotional Characteristics, Emotional Experience, And Personality Research

In this article two studies were conducted to examine the characters of junior high school students' emotional semantic representation and emotional experience, and investigate the relationship between them. In study 1, we got access to the subjects' emotional semantic representation by using emotion-related words similarity rating and multiple dimensional scaling method, and we obtained their lively emotion experience by the method of experience sampling procedure, and the statistical method is factor analysis. Result shows that two-dimensional MDS solutions best modeled all sets of similarity ratings and revealed a clear circumplex at the two dimensional solution whose axes (dimensions) can be interpreted as valence and arousal. On average, in semantic representation individuals tended to weight valance-based properties donated by emotion words; the valence-arousal circumplex can also accounts for the emotion experience and subjects are inclined to be valance-focused in emotional experience. When reports one's experience, there are more variation in individual's arousal focus than in valance focus. By empirically connecting the individual difference in semantic representation and emotional experience we can draw the conclusion that verbal report can reflect authentic emotional experience of subjects on average level, and it can better reflect valance-based information than arousal-based information.In the second study we examined the relationship between individual difference in emotion structure and the characters of personalities .The result indicated that valence-focus is positively correlated with Extraversion and cognitive styles while arousal-focus is negatively correlated with Extraversion cognitive styles.