VAD cube
Valence, arousal and dominance on −1..1. Where the state sits. Mehrabian & Russell, used not owned.
Lexicon · Version 1.0.0 · 131 terms
Smaller. More appropriate. More accurate.
Not thousands of rated tokens. One hundred and thirty-one authored feeling words you can show someone back to themselves — with VAD, wheel tier, and family intensity, and without cactus, trashbag, or a clinical insult sitting next to a coordinate.
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Nearest-neighbour dumps from a general word list can label a person cactus, trashbag, fart, or dialysis because those tokens happen to sit near a VAD point. That is clinically damaging and absurd. This lexicon contains only plain-English feeling words suitable to show a client. It is authored, not scraped. It is not NRC-VAD.
Tier
Broad, mid, fine — generalisation versus specificity, like an emotion wheel. Far zoom stays at the hub.
Intensity
Authored rank inside one family. Not arousal. Tired can be more intense than depleted-looking activation.
Orthogonal layers
On a classic emotion wheel, general/weak sit at the hub and specific/strong sit on the petals — one radius. They often travel together. They are not the same question. Angry is general and fairly strong. Irritated is weaker — everyday, not a hub. Furious is specific and strong. Tier is what a zoom may say. Intensity is whether it escalated inside the family.
VAD
Where in the cube. Sensors may emit raw VAD; words still come from this list.
Valence
Arousal
Dominance
Tier · emotion wheel
Hub is general. Petals are specific. A theme must not be labelled with a fine petal.
Broad — hub · session / theme · 11 terms
Mid — everyday · event / cluster · 63 terms
Fine — petal · one capture · 57 terms
Intensity
Strength inside one family, weakest first. Cross-family comparison is unavailable.
irritated → furious
tired → depleted
content → overjoyed
Family × tier grid
Rows are intensity families. Columns are wheel tiers. Empty cells are allowed: not every family has a hub word, and some states have no intensity at all.
They often travel together. They are not the same.
angry
General, and fairly strong. A hub word for a whole stretch of session.
- Tier
- broad
- Intensity
- 6 of 8 in anger
irritated
Weaker. Everyday mid-tier — not a hub word, and not an escalation.
- Tier
- mid
- Intensity
- 1 of 8 in anger
furious
Specific, and strong. The Plutchik outer petal — here the two axes line up.
- Tier
- fine
- Intensity
- 8 of 8 in anger
happy → overjoyed
The case that looks like one wheel radius: more specific and more intense together. Still two moves.
- happy
- broad · 2 of 6 in joy
- overjoyed
- fine · 6 of 6 in joy
A Plutchik wheel fuses those into one radius. We split them because zoom must not confuse “how precise may I be?” with “did this escalate?”
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What this is not
A lexical match is evidence, not a diagnosis. Phrase-sense analysis (fine, I’m done) is not a second lexicon. Categorical centroids (Calvo & Kim) remain a separate hub layer. Synthetic oversampling may rebalance observations; it must not invent new feeling words.