Redundancy, isomorphism, and propagative mechanisms between emotional and amodal representations of words: A computational study.

Some proposals claim that language acts as a link to propagate emotional and other modal information. Thus, there is an eminently amodal path of emotional propagation in the mental lexicon. Following these proposals, we present a computational model that emulates a linking mechanism (mapping function) between emotional and amodal representations of words using vector space models, emotional feature-based models, and neural networks. We analyzed three central concepts within the embodiment debate (redundancy, isomorphism, and propagative mechanisms) comparing two alternative hypotheses: semantic neighborhood hypothesis versus specific dimensionality hypothesis. Univariate and multivariate neural networks were trained for dimensional (N = 11,357) and discrete emotions (N = 2,266), and later we analyzed its predictions in a test set (N = 4,167 and N = 875, respectively). We showed how this computational model could propagate emotional responses to words without a direct emotional experience via amodal propagation, but no direct relations were found between emotional rates and amodal distances. Thereby, we found that there were clear redundancy and propagative mechanisms, but no isomorphism should be assumed. Results suggested that it was necessary to establish complex links to go beyond amodal distances of vector spaces. In this way, although the emotional rates of semantic neighborhoods could predict the emotional rates of target words, the mapping function of specific amodal features seemed to simulate emotional responses better. Thus, both hypotheses would not be mutually exclusive. We also showed that discrete emotions could have simpler relations between modal and amodal representations than dimensional emotions. All these results and their theoretical implications are discussed.