Abstract
We examined the relationship among four basic-level emotions and free associated words and discussed the independence of basic-level emotion using chain association. Different groups of undergraduate students including both gender took part in three experiments. In the first experiment subjects (n=195) associated freely four basic-level emotional words, "happy", "sad", "anger", "relax". Twelve words which subjects had responded frequently in the first experiment were selected as stimulus words in the second experiment, and subjects (n=141) associated those twelve words freely as the previous experiment. Finally, in the third experiment, subjects (n=50) rated the degree of relationship among four emotional words and associated words.The multivariate analysis showed that there was an intimate relationship between a few word which were associated the unpleasant emotional category with and the pleasant emotional category. We discussed that non-linear transformation process in the word association were reflected in our results.
