The present study provides affective norms for a large corpus of French words (N = 1,031) that were rated on emotional valence and emotional arousal by 469 French young adults. Ratings were made using the Self-Assessment Manikin (Lang, 1980). By combining evaluations of valence and arousal, and including ratings provided by male and female young adults, this database complements and extends existing French-language databases. The response reliability for the two affective dimensions was good, and the consistency between the present and previous ratings was high. We found a strong quadratic relationship between the valence and arousal ratings. Perceptions of the affective content of a word were partly linked to sex. This new affective database (FAN) will enable French-speaking researchers to select suitable materials for studies of how the character of affective words influences their cognitive processing. FAN is available as an online supplement downloadable with this article.

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The present study provides a French child database containing a large corpus of words (N = 600) that were rated on emotional valence (positive, neutral, and negative) by French children differing in both age (5, 7, and 9 years old) and sex (girls and boys). Good response reliability was observed in each of the three age groups. The results showed some age differences in the children's ratings. With increasing age, the percentage of words rated positive decreased, whereas the percentage of neutral words increased and the percentage of negative words remained stable. Our study did not reveal marked differences across sex groups. The database compiled here should become a useful tool for experimental studies in which verbal material is used with children. It would be worthwhile in future research to study how children process emotional words and also to control the emotional variable in the same way as other linguistic variables in the experimental design. The norms from this study may be downloaded from brm.psychonomic-journals.org/content/supplemental.

FANchild (French Affective Norms for Children) provides norms of valence and arousal for a large corpus of French words (N = 720) rated by 908 French children and adolescents (ages 7, 9, 11, and 13). The ratings were made using the Self-Assessment Manikin (Lang, 1980). Because it combines evaluations of arousal and valence and includes ratings provided by 7-, 9-, 11-, and 13-year-olds, this database complements and extends existing French-language databases. Good response reliability was observed in each of the four age groups. Despite a significant level of consensus, we found age differences in both the valence and arousal ratings: Seven-and 9-year-old children gave higher mean valence and arousal ratings than did the other age groups. Moreover, the tendency to judge words positively (i.e., positive bias) decreased with age. This age-and sex-related database will enable French-speaking researchers to study how the emotional character of words influences their cognitive processing, and how this influence evolves with age. FANchild is available at https:// www.researchgat e.net /profi le/Catherine_ Monnier/contributions.

Résumé Dans ce travail, nous présentons une norme concernant la dimension émotionnelle de 604 mots, effectuée à partir d’une évaluation de la valence avec une échelle nominale à trois modalités (négatif, neutre et positif) et d’une évaluation de la valence combinée à l’intensité avec une échelle ordinale bipolaire relative en 11 points. Au total 600 participants ont participé à ces deux évaluations. Les classifications des mots obtenues à partir de ces deux types d’échelle diffèrent. Les mots classés comme étant indubitablement de valence positive ou négative dans la première évaluation ne sont pas pour autant tous classés parmi les mots les plus intenses dans la deuxième évaluation. D’un autre côté, la prise en compte des résultats des deux évaluations est particulièrement heuristique pour l’identification de mots réellement neutres. Ces deux évaluations viennent compléter les normes sur la dimension émotionnelle déjà existantes et devraient favoriser la manipulation expérimentale de facteurs sémantiques dans les recherches en psycholinguistique.