If you are like most Americans, you feel that doctors  are helpful, powerful, and reserved. That's your sentiment about doctors, the way you feel in general about them even though you might have different feelings in some circumstances. The general sentiment about children is quite different: children are good, weak, and noisy for most Americans. Gangsters provoke still another sentiment: bad, powerful, and active.

People who live in different societies have different sentiments. The sentiments of a people are part of their culture - the unique meanings held by people in that society. Groups within a society also have some sentiments that differ from sentiments of other people in their society. The sentiments of people in a group are part of their sub-culture - the unique meanings held by people in that group.

EPA

Sentiments have three aspects. Evaluation concerns goodness versus badness, Potency concerns powerfulness versus powerlessness, and Activity concerns liveliness versus quietness. The three aspects are abbreviated EPA.

Each aspect, or dimension, of sentiments can be described by a variety of contrasts, as indicated in the table below. Judgments within each dimension are correlated - for example, something judged sweet is also likely to be called clean. Judgments across dimensions are uncorrelated - for example, knowing something is powerful provides no clue as to whether it is good or bad.

Individuals' identities and social behaviors vary on the EPA dimensions. Here are some examples.

Each aspect is a matter of degree, can be greater or less. For example, some things are slightly good, others are quite good, still others are extremely good.

One way of picturing this is to imagine that sentiments are floating around the room you're in. Things that are very good are up near the ceiling, those that are very bad are near the floor. Things that are powerful are near the wall in front of you, weak things are near the wall behind you. Lively things are on your right, and quiet things are on the left side. Things that are neither good nor bad, powerful nor powerless, lively nor quiet hang around the center of the room. So to "see" a grandparent you glance upward to your left at the good, powerful, quiet corner. To see a child you turn your head and look up over your right shoulder at the good, powerless, lively corner. To see a gangster you look down to your right at the bad, powerful, lively corner.

Ways of acting are in the room, too. Look up in front of you to your right, and there's making love to someone. Now drop your eyes to the floor along that same corner of the room, and you see raping someone. Look down behind you on the left; there's abandoning someone. Look up, forward to your left to see forgiving someone.

Rating EPA

The custom is to measure sentiments from the center of the room and use plus units to measure up (goodness), forward (powerfulness), and right (liveliness); minus units for bad, powerless, or quiet. The units of measurement are somewhat like yards or meters, in that the walls are 4.3 units away from the center of the room, as are the floor and ceiling. An EPA profile is a list of three such measures: the first number represents Evaluation, the second is Potency, and the third is Activity.

You can measure your sentiments on rating scales. Rating scales present words for describing your feelings, and you position a marker to show which words are closest to your feelings. Your ratings get converted into numbers depending on where the marker is. For example, something that you rate as "quite good, nice" gets coded +2 on Evaluation.

Try measuring some of your sentiments by clicking this link.

The program used in the exercise computes the distances between your sentiments and sentiments associated with various kinds of people. This illustrates that sentiments measured as numbers can be analyzed mathematically.

Universality of EPA

People everywhere respond to things along the same three dimensions of sentiments - Evaluation, Potency, Activity. That's not just an assumption. It's an empirical finding from cross-cultural research in dozens of societies, conducted in the following steps.

1. Concepts that exist in every culture - like father, mother, child, water, moon - were assembled into a list.
2.  Natives in each culture were asked to respond to each concept on the list with a modifier, and to name the opposite of that modifier. For example, some individuals in the U.S.A. might respond to mother with the word sweet, and give the word sour as the opposite.
3. The modifier opposites were formed into scales, and natives used the scales to rate each concept on the list. Ratings of a concept on a scale were averaged to get a number indicating how raters from that culture typically positioned the concept on the scale.
4. Pan-cultural correlation coefficients among the mean ratings were computed.
   A correlation coefficient is a number between -1.0 and +1.0 that indicates how well you can predict one set of numbers from another set: 0.0 means that no prediction is possible, 1.0 means the numbers in one set move up and down exactly the same as in the other set, and -1.0 means that numbers in one set go up and down exactly the opposite of numbers in the other set.
   For example, average ratings on the sweet-sour scale and on a good-bad scale were compared in order to compute a numerical correlation between the two scales. Additionally average ratings on the sweet-sour scale and on a bueno-malo scale used in Mexico were compared across all concepts in order to define the correlation between those two scales.
5. Statistical analysis of the correlations showed that the scales clustered into three major groups - Evaluation, Potency, Activity - and every culture contributed scales to each group. For example, all three scales mentioned above ended up in the Evaluation cluster, indicating that concepts rated as sweet by Americans tended to be rated good by Americans, and bueno by Mexicans.

The pan-cultural analysis depends on people in different cultures having similar perspectives regarding basic concepts, even though specific sentiments differ. You can see how this assumption does hold cross-culturally for father, mother, and child in a chart shown elsewhere in this tutorial.

The pan-cultural analyses indicate that sentiments everywhere involve three dimensions, and those three dimensions are the same in every culture.