The Semantics of Happiness and Joy in the Italian Language

Abstract A number of contemporary researchers have proposed considering happiness and joy as distinct phenomena and theoretical constructs. However, there is as yet insufficient information regarding whether the theoretical and empirical arguments for distinguishing happiness from joy also apply to folk representations of these concepts. This work presents two studies in which Italian speakers performed a free-listing task asking them to list words semantically equivalent to the Italian words felicità (happiness) (Study 1) and gioia (joy) (Study 2). A comparison between the two studies revealed that the Italian concepts of happiness and joy had 49 lexical items in common, 32 of which related to emotions. Interestingly, 11 of the latter ranked in the top 10 cognitive salience indexes obtained from both Study 1 and Study 2. It is argued that the semantic similarities between the two words examined – felicità and gioia – should not overshadow the meaning nuances distinguishing them.