Figure 1.

The findings of Lench et al.’s (2011) pairwise comparisons between emotions can be accounted for by differences in valence and arousal between emotions. Emotion categories are depicted in a circumplex structure based on their average degree of valence and arousal. Effect sizes for each paired comparison are listed. The largest effect sizes occur for cross-valence comparisons, followed by cross-arousal comparisons. The smallest effect size observed is between anger and anxiety, emotions of the same valence and arousal.