The Grid Project

The GRID Project is an international research initiative of the Swiss Center for the Affective Sciences. The International GRID Research Consortium was founded in 2005 to organize a world-wide study of the semantics of emotion terms using a componential approach. It brings together researchers from 34 countries and varied disciplines who have a major interest in language and emotion. The study is based on an online questionnaire that has been translated and administered in over 20 languages and countries from all over the world.

The GRID project has three concrete goals, namely (1) testing whether the basic assumption of the componential emotion theory applies to the semantic field of emotions, (2) identifying the underlying dimensional structure of the domain and of each specific emotion component (3) identifying cross-cultural similarities and differences in the semantic profiles of emotion terms, and evaluating the equivalence between words (click to read more).

The GRID questionnaire comprises 24 emotion terms and 144 emotion characteristics. The 24 emotion terms are representative of the overall scope of the emotion domain. The 144 emotion characteristics refer to the different components of emotion, such as appraisals, bodily changes, expressions (vocal, facial and gestural), action tendencies, and feelings, in addition to emotion regulation processes. Participants are asked to evaluate to what extent each emotion characteristic can be inferred when an emotion term is used in their own cultural group. Short versions of the instrument (CoreGRID and MiniGRID) are also available.

The first results of the cross-cultural study will be published by Oxford University Press in the volume “Components of Emotion: A Sourcebook”, currently in press and edited by Johnny Fontaine, Klaus Scherer and Cristina Soriano (see more GRID-related publications).

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