Affective norms of 875 Spanish words for five discrete emotional categories and two emotional dimensions

Abstract

In the present study, we introduce affective norms for a new set of Spanish words, the Madrid Affective Database for Spanish (MADS), that were scored on two emotional dimensions (valence and arousal) and on five discrete emotional categories (happiness, anger, sadness, fear, and disgust), as well as on concreteness, by 660 Spanish native speakers. Measures of several objective psycholinguistic variables-grammatical class, word frequency, number of letters, and number of syllables-for the words are also included. We observed high split-half reliabilities for every emotional variable and a strong quadratic relationship between valence and arousal. Additional analyses revealed several associations between the affective dimensions and discrete emotions, as well as with some psycholinguistic variables. This new corpus complements and extends prior databases in Spanish and allows for designing new experiments investigating the influence of affective content in language processing under both dimensional and discrete theoretical conceptions of emotion. These norms can be downloaded as supplemental materials for this article from www.dropbox.com/s/o6dpw3irk6utfhy/ Hinojosa%20et%20al_Supplementary%20materials.xlsx?dl=0.

Affective norms for 720 French words rated by children and adolescents (FANchild)

“…It is also worth noting that, although we found high interrater reliabilities for both valence and arousal for the four age groups, word assessments seemed to be more consensual on the positive-negative continuum than on the calm-excited continuum. These findings are in line with previous ones (e.g., Hinojosa et al, 2016;Montefinese et al, 2014;Moors et al, 2013). Tables 2 and 3 give Pearson correlations between the evaluations of children and adolescents for both the valence and arousal dimensions.…”

Spanish norms for affective and lexico-semantic variables for 1,400 words

“…The Likert scales used to assess concreteness, imageability, context availability, and familiarity included seven points, as with the scales that had been used to develop EsPal (Duchon et al, 2013) and other Spanish databases (Hinojosa et al, 2015;Moreno-Martínez, Montoro, & Rodríguez-Rojo, 2014). In this way, our values can be directly compared to those reported in these databases.…”

“…Words in common correlated r(1101) = .88, p < .001, on concreteness; r(1069) = .87, p < .001, on imageability; and r(1102) = .69, p < .001, on familiarity. We also compared our concreteness ratings with those of Hinojosa et al (2015), obtaining a correlation of r(132) = .82, p < .001. Concerning familiarity, we also considered the study by Moreno-Martínez, Montoro, and Rodríguez-Rojo (2014), obtaining a correlation of r(132) = .76, p < .001, for the 134 words that the two databases have in common.…”

“…In contrast, no such large corpus exists for Spanish. Concerning emotionality, to our knowledge there are only four affective databases from which researchers interested in emotional word processing can select their stimuli: the Spanish adaptation of ANEW (Redondo, Fraga, Padrón, & Comesaña, 2007); the affective norms of Ferré, Guasch, Moldovan, and Sánchez-Casas (2012); the affective norms of Redondo, Fraga, Comesaña, and Perea (2005); and the affective norms of Hinojosa et al (2015). The four databases together contain affective ratings for 2,525 different words.…”

“…The four databases together contain affective ratings for 2,525 different words. Regarding concreteness and its associated variables, both Ferré et al (2012) and Hinojosa et al (2015) collected concreteness ratings for all of their stimuli. In addition, the database of Ferré et al (2012) contains values for familiarity.…”