Basic Emotions in the Nencki Affective Word List (NAWL BE): New Method of Classifying Emotional Stimuli

Abstract

The Nencki Affective Word List (NAWL) has recently been introduced as a standardized database of Polish words suitable for studying various aspects of language and emotions. Though the NAWL was originally based on the most commonly used dimensional approach, it is not the only way of studying emotions. Another framework is based on discrete emotional categories. Since the two perspectives are recognized as complementary, the aim of the present study was to supplement the NAWL database by the addition of categories corresponding to basic emotions. Thus, 2902 Polish words from the NAWL were presented to 265 subjects, who were instructed to rate them according to the intensity of each of the five basic emotions: happiness, anger, sadness, fear and disgust. The general characteristics of the present word database, as well as the relationships between the studied variables are shown to be consistent with typical patterns found in previous studies using similar databases for different languages. Here we present the Basic Emotions in the Nencki Affective Word List (NAWL BE) as a database of verbal material suitable for highly controlled experimental research. To make the NAWL more convenient to use, we introduce a comprehensive method of classifying stimuli to basic emotion categories. We discuss the advantages of our method in comparison to other methods of classification. Additionally, we provide an interactive online tool (http://exp.lobi.nencki.gov.pl/nawl-analysis) to help researchers browse and interactively generate classes of stimuli to meet their specific requirements.

Minho Affective Sentences (MAS): Probing the roles of sex, mood, and empathy in affective ratings of verbal stimuli

“…For example, each discrete emotion may be identified by a specific set of coordinates in the multidimensional affective space, such as valence and arousal (e.g., Stevenson & James, 2008;Stevenson, Mikels, & James, 2007;Wierzba et al, 2015). Additionally, the effects of categories on affective dimensions are heterogeneous, supporting the need to reconsider dimensional and categorical approaches as independent perspectives (e.g., Stevenson et al, 2007).…”

“…Additionally, the effects of categories on affective dimensions are heterogeneous, supporting the need to reconsider dimensional and categorical approaches as independent perspectives (e.g., Stevenson et al, 2007). Therefore, dimensional and discrete approaches are not mutually exclusive: When combined, they may provide complementary information, and both should be taken into account when conducting experimental studies of emotion (e.g., Christie & Friedman, 2004;Russell, 2003;Stevenson & James, 2008;Stevenson et al, 2007;Wierzba et al, 2015). Recognizing the advantages of the combination of dimensional and categorical accounts, with the present study we aimed to collect categorical and dimensional affective ratings for 192 European Portuguese sentences, to provide a deeper understanding of the emotional features of the stimuli under study.…”

Towards New Mappings between Emotion Representation Models

“…Sample annotations of words from the Synesketch lexicon. , was manually annotated twice by a significant number of annotators using two different representation models, forming a natural set for this study [31,32]. The models used for annotation were: pleasure-arousal-imageability and a subset of Ekman's six, namely: happiness, anger, disgust, sadness and fear.…”

“…As in NAWL, [31,32], a list of words was annotated twice, the creation of the dataset was (almost) automatic-the only operation to perform was a pair-wise (same word!) concatenation of the two annotations from separate files.…”

“…For affective annotations of specific words, please refer to the original lexicons. Please cite Rieleg et al and Wierzba et al [31,32] …”