Examined the category structure of "joy" and "shame" emotions. In this study the organization of emotions into abstract categories with a prototype structure based on family resemblances was proposed. Forty male introductory psychology students judged 56 slides of human faces (posed by other such students) as expressing either joy or shame and rated the degree of typicality of each face. Faces rated as more typical were recognized significantly more quickly and accurately. Correlations between typicality and latency were also significant. More intense expressions of both emotion categories were rated as more typical of the category. A reliable instrument for future study of recognition of the two emotions was developed. The family resemblance-prototype structure for emotion categories was supported.
Current conceptualizations of facial emotional expression and its recognition are of three types: Categories, dimensions, and hierarchial combinations of categories and dimensions (Strongman, 1978). We suggest that, in expression and recognition, emotions are organized into categories with a prototype structure based on family resemblances.
According to Strongman (1978), categories of emotion are viewed in one way as classes that are unrelated and unordered (Tomkins & McCarter, 1964). Under the dimensional view, dimensions of emotion may mix together to form an emotional expression. This accounts for the similarity of distinct emotional expressions, such as contempt and mirth. The dimensions are considered orthogonal to each other (Osgood, 1966; Schlosberg, 1954). In the hierarchial model, although each category may have its own distinguishable features, emotional expressions may be comparable along certain dimensions, both within and between categories (Fridja, 1969). Although our speculation is not new, we propose that the semantic structure of emotion is a category system based on a family resemblance-prototype structure. This type of category organization provides both distinguishable categories and dimensional comparisons within and between categories.
Fridja (1969) suggested that family resemblances are in the expressive patterns of emotion in faces. However, this was prior to the recent empirical work that has developed a methodology for investigating family resemblances (Rosch & Mervis, 1975) and prototypes (Rosch, 1975; Smith, Shoben, & Rips, 1974). Pattern recognition has been described as involving abstraction, and the structure of an abstract concept has been described as a prototype structure (Posner & Keele, 1968). In a category of many examples of a concept, the prototype is defined as a central tendency surrounded by less 'This work was supported in part by Veterans Administration Funds. The authors would like to thank Dr. N . Jack Kanak, Chairman of the Department of Psychology, University of Oklahoma, for his professional advice and assistance. In addition, we would like to thank Martha Nagle and Richard Wierimaa for their technical assistance. PReprint requests should be sent to Vladimir Pishkin, Behavioral Sciences Laborstories (15 I A), Veterans Administration Medical Center,