nucleation

LIT-1437: The World of Emotions is not Two-Dimensional

2 min read

Properties2
StatusUnavailable — registered 2026-10-23 from Crossref, not read: a lawful copy exists but this client could not reach it. The University of Geneva's Archive ouverte holds the published version (unige:97776) restricted to UNIGE/HUG users. The University of Reading's repository (CentAUR, eprint 30302) and Ghent University's bibliography (418787) list it without a public full text. The SAGE PDF refused this client behind a bot check, and the Geneva E3 Lab's publications page does not post it. A web search found no author or course posting. OpenAlex points to a CiteSeerX cache, which was not used because its source could not be traced. Its four dimensions are read from the PubMed abstract, and its "potency-control" dimension is glossed as "dominance" by Shuman, Sander and Scherer (LIT-1458). Filed because the record renamed its "dominance" to "potential" to avoid the PAD homonym, and this is the study that places the PAD axis among the component process model's dimensions. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied, not on merit.
Tagsemotion-and-affect, psychometrics, linguistics

Graph View

Johnny R. J. Fontaine, Klaus R. Scherer, Etienne B. Roesch & Phoebe C. Ellsworth (2007), Psychological Science 18(12):1050–1057 — DOI-10.1111/j.1467-9280.2007.02024.x

Key takeaways

Registered, not read. From the abstract:

  • “Today, many researchers focus exclusively on two-dimensional models involving valence and arousal.”
  • “We show for three languages that four dimensions are needed to satisfactorily represent similarities and differences in the meaning of emotion words. In order of importance, these dimensions are evaluation-pleasantness, potency-control, activation-arousal, and unpredictability.”
  • “They were identified on the basis of the applicability of 144 features representing the six components of emotions”: appraisals, psychophysiological changes, motor expressions, action tendencies, subjective experiences and emotion regulation.

What could not be checked without the text: the languages, the loadings, how the potency-control dimension is defined, and whether the paper discusses Mehrabian and Russell’s dominance axis by name.

Standing in the record

Filed on 2026-10-23 for a terminological reason. The record’s account of valence (CLAIM-440, TERM-076) used “dominance” for an ordering that wins a system’s internal negotiation. The same word names the third axis of Mehrabian and Russell’s pleasure–arousal–dominance model, and the component process model’s own school uses it for Fontaine et al.’s second dimension: “other dimensions that characterize the affective space are arousal, dominance, and novelty (e.g., Fontaine et al., 2007, in press)” (Shuman et al. 2013, p. 4, NOTE-1108). That dimension corresponds to the power and control appraisals, the agent’s capacity to influence its situation. It is a different thing from the record’s notion, which concerns which of the system’s own orderings prevails. The rename to “potential” keeps them apart. How the two interact is noted in NOTE-1106: high control amplifies the efferent effects of goal congruence.

No instruction for machine-learning practice; nothing here belongs in the anthology.

Backlinks