They were selected on the basis of the ratings participants gave each word on the semantic variable concreteness/abstractness, whereby the 20 more concrete emotion words with sensorimotor links were partitioned from the 20 more abstract words.
Whereas action words were rated as strongly face- or arm-related and, in addition, as highly imageable and concrete, emotion words were judged to have significantly weaker semantic links to the effectors of the body (F2,119 = 5.394, P < 0.01) and to be significantly lower in valence than the action items (F2,119 = 46.739, P < 0.001).
For example, in The Fragility of Goodness Martha Nussbaum has described the virtues of an Aristotelian ethics with its emphasis on the importance of concrete context, emotion and care for others in an ethical life (Nussbaum 1986).
He can cope with facts, with concrete detail; emotions confuse and alarm him.
Philosophy is an abstract, intellectual, and solitary activity, while moral decision-making is and should be concrete, driven by emotion as much as by the intellect, and shaped by our interactions with the people affected by our actions.
She understood Abstract Expressionism to be based on the premise that art could, and should, be a vehicle for certain concrete but ineffable emotions.
They traffic in a calculating mélange of taciturn dreams, emptied of emotion, weirdly concrete, affecting a kind of earnest but slightly grating obscurity.
But he quickly follows up the emotion with concrete demands on behalf of his own power base, in this case one of his charities: "In both these cases my Trust has sympathetic developers and sponsors waiting in the wings".
Studies such as Poldrack's, which aim to correlate hard-to-describe personal experiences such as mood or emotion with concrete measurements, for example, are among them because the researchers have particular expertise that makes them ideal subjects.
And really, I guess loving is a form of faith -- a way of believing in something without concrete proof, an illogical emotion whispering to you that, in spite of all evidence to the contrary, it's worth being vulnerable enough to put your bruised and cynical old heart out there.
The Bible passage speaks to our senses and emotions with concrete nouns (sun, bread), descriptions of people (the swift, the wise, men of understanding, men of skill) and punchy abstract nouns (race, battle, riches, time, chance).
