Gonzalez and Cohen-Charash show that the vocabulary used to classify emotions carries evaluative force. Across four studies involving 818 participants, the familiar labels “positive” and “negative” were found to be more value-laden than supposedly descriptive alternatives such as “pleasant” and “unpleasant”, affecting judgements not only of emotions but of the people expressing them. The paper’s iconic contribution is the Words-as-Values framework: terminology operates as a normative device that can make feelings and subjects appear desirable, undesirable, moral or problematic before any further interpretation takes place. Methodologically, the authors compare alternative terminological frames and trace their consequences across perception and evaluation rather than treating wording as a neutral experimental wrapper. The study connects affective science with framing theory, linguistic relativity and norm formation. Its importance exceeds terminological hygiene: it provides experimental evidence that ordinary psychological classifications participate in the realities they claim merely to describe, converting language into a subtle technology of emotional governance.