A Frequency and Semantic Analysis of the Most Frequent Connotations of the Notion of Beauty
Journal Title: European Journal of Behavioral Sciences - Year 2021, Vol 4, Issue 1
Abstract
In order to define and determine the meaning of a notion, its use in the natural language is a valuable source of information. Analyses aimed at understanding the meaning of a particular expression include the observation of its connotations. It is assumed that each meaningful word in a language is characterised by a set of semantic connotations and these connotations are a product of the experiences that are communicated by the use of the word. The term “beauty” is one of the most complex and multidimensional words. The study concentrates on the identification of its connotations in the natural language of 1,558 users aged 19 to 89 years (mean age = 45.23; SD = 16.33 years); there were slightly more women in the sample (52.7%). The most frequent connotation of the notion of beauty was nature, followed by woman, love, family, and child (the connotations occurred in more than 15 % of the language users in the observed sample). Most of the connotations (93.7 %) were nouns, which testifies to the substantive character of the notion of beauty. The content analysis of the connotations revealed seven areas to which they related – nature, values, feelings, people, objects, abstract ideas, and activities. Deeper analyses pointed to the necessity to study the possible influence of other variables (gender, age, value orientation ...) on the understanding of the notion of beauty and its connotations.
Authors and Affiliations
Slavka Demuthova, Andrej Demuth
Keywords
Related Articles
- EP ID EP743796
- DOI https://doi.org/10.33422/ejbs.v4i1.611
- Views 35
- Downloads 0
Process of Parentification And Construction of Ego Identity in The Cameroonian Adolescents
Culture and idiosyncratic family configuration play a significant role in neglect, such as parentification. Some family systems may engender an inappropriate overlap in subsystems, with member participating in roles that...
Undergraduate Students’ Personality Traits: Relationship with Students’ Gender and Parental Socioeconomic Factors
The study investigates in 301 university students, the relationship of Big Five Factors Model/BFFM personality traits with gender and parental socioeconomic factors. Students completed the International Personality Item...
A Review of the Perceptions of Mental Illness and Mental Health Literacy in Indonesia
Perceptions of mental health are often influenced by religious, sociopolitical and cultural beliefs, as well as differing views, values and attitudes towards the medical model of diagnosis, the potential causes of mental...
The Picture of Dorian Gray; The Return of the Real
I feel that my analysis, which endeavours to articulate the operational Lacanian concepts onto Wilde’s fiction, will achieve a “liberating” of the meaning from the text, an enterprise which can be equated with a transval...
My Fate Is My Decision: The Differential Effects of Fate and Criticality of Decision Beliefs on Career Decision Making Self-Efficacy
Dysfunctional career decision-making beliefs (DCB) impede career decision making (CDM) process in several ways. This study proposes to delineate the profiles of two career-specific dysfunctional beliefs, fate (FB) and cr...