Cracking the semantic code

Half of a word's meaning is simply a three dimensional summary of the rewards associated with it, according to an analysis of millions of blog entries undertaken by researchers from the University of Bristol and published today in PLoS ONE. We make choices about pretty much everything, all the time  - "Should I go for a walk or grab a coffee?";  "Shall I look at who just came in or continue to watch TV?" - and to do so we need something common as a basis to make the choice. John Fennell and Roland Baddeley of Bristol's School of Experimental Psychology followed a hunch that the common quantity, often referred to simply as reward, was a representation of what could be gained, together with how risky and uncertain it is. They proposed that these dimensions would be a unique feature of all objects and be part of what those things mean to us. Over 50 years ago, psychologist Charles Osgood developed an influential method, known as the 'semantic differential', that attempts to measure the connotative, emotional meaning of a word or concept. Osgood found that about 50 per cent of the variation in a large number of ratings that people made about words and concepts could be captured using just three summary dimensions: 'evaluation' (how nice or good the object is), 'potency' (how strong or powerful an object is) and 'activity' (whether the object is active, unpredictable or chaotic). So, half of a concept's meaning is simply a measure of how nice, strong, and active it is.