A long term goal is to explicate the nature of the cognitive representations of lexical and contextual similarities of the major syntactic classes of emotional concepts employing newer methods of data collection. In particular, perceived ratings of semantic similarity and dissimilarity and sortings of contextual discriminability of emotional nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs are examined. Prior research has emphasized assessing emotional nouns and adjectives at the expense of verbs and adverbs, while empirical data on contextual information is scant, and none exist on contextual discriminability of the emotions. A long tradition of cognitive psychologists have assumed that the cognitive representations of emotion words and subjective experiences of emotions are related. Many psychologist also have argued for a close interaction between the meaning of a word and the meaning of its linguistic context. Thusly, analyses of emotional lexical and contextual similarities can elucidate the nature of their cognitive representations and the relations between the different emotional representation, as well as explicate any role of emotions in mental and physical health and behavior. To achieve these objectives the research will focus on four specific issues: (a) examine psychological theories bout the representation and acquisition of semantic similarity and semantic opposition targeting all form classes of emotional words and contexts, (b) examine psychological theories about the interactions between the acquisition of semantic and syntactic structures targeting all form classes of emotional words and contexts, (c) examine psychological theories about the bipolar dimensionality of emotions targeting all form classes of emotional words and contexts, (d) explore the development and comparison of an interval scale rating test for eliciting similarities/dissimilarities versus variations in conventional psychological rating tests for eliciting lexical similarity; and the relatively new sorting method of contextual discriminability is the choice. Mental and physical health professionals and behavioral scientists all benefits from precision in theory and in methods of measurements and data collection.
| Ofosu, M H; Brown, C; Cheatham, W et al. (1998) TAP1 polymorphism identified in African-American Graves' disease patients. Immunol Invest 27:281-9 |
| Ofosu, M H; Dunston, G; Henry, L et al. (1996) HLA-DQ3 is associated with Graves' disease in African-Americans. Immunol Invest 25:103-10 |
