The present study develops key research for French word norms that combines the predominant theories of dimensional and discrete (or categorical) emotions. As a result, we provide the database FANCat, affective norms for a set of 1031 French words on ten discrete emotion categories: fear, anger, disgust, sadness, anxiety, awe, excitement, contentment, amusement, and serenity. FANCat complements a previous word set, FAN, which provides only the dimensional norms, valence, and arousal (Monnier & Syssau, 2014). Herein, we introduce five discrete positive emotions in efforts to differentiate positive emotions at higher resolution and specificity. Although ten emotional categories were considered in FANCat norms, results showed a high degree of inter-rater reliability and a good external validity. Then, distributional analyses of words into the ten emotion categories revealed that positive words evoked mainly the emotions awe, contentment, and amusement, and principally evoked either one positive emotion only ("pure" words) or two (mixed words). This study contributes to a deeper understanding of the relationship between language, and negative and positive emotions. It is also currently the only norms database in French that analyses ten discrete emotions as well as including valence and arousal. FANCat is available at https://www.researchgate.net/publication/ 338622765_FANCat_database.
Keywords Affective norms . Discrete emotion categories . Positive and negative emotionsMany studies that seek to understand how the affective characteristics of words may influence their processing, rely on tasks that require norm lists, like the one developed herein. Currently, there are two types of norms that are useful for characterizing the affective meaning of words: dimensional and categorical norms.The most widely used dimensional norms list is currently known as Bradley and Lang's (1999) Affective Norms for English Words (ANEW), which provides valence, arousal, and dominance norms for 1034 English verbs, nouns, and adjectives. Bradley and Lang carried out their work within a framework of dimensional characterization of emotions, initially proposed by Wundt (1896) and revived by Osgood, Suci, and Tannenbaum (1957). According to this perspective, all emotional experiences can be characterized according to three dimensions: valence (which ranges from positive to negative), arousal (which ranges from calm to exciting), and dominance (which ranges from in control to out of control). This three-dimensional affective model was later reduced to a two-dimensional model, relying solely on the valence and arousal dimensions (Russell, 2003).The ANEW dimensional norms database has since been adapted into several languages, including German (Affective norms for German sentiment terms,
