The adequacy of the selection criteria for adjectives used in mood adjective check lists has remained unquestioned. A review shows that past lists have been assembled according to arbitrary hypotheses about the underlying structure of affect, which may have biased sampling from the domain of possible descriptors of emotion. In addition, a substantial proportion of the words included in past lists are unrepresentative of emotion. 100 subjects judged how representative of emotion was each word contained in the 1965 Nowlis list. All ratings were reliable. Over-all, an average of one-third of the words included in past studies were judged as unrepresentative of emotion. The arbitrary nature of the initial adjective selection criteria, coupled with the finding that many of the words studied are not representative of emotion, suggests that a reevaluation of current taxonomies of mood and emotion is necessary.
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