Characterization of the Affective Norms for English Words by discrete emotional categories

Abstract

1020Affect has been studied using a wide range of methodologies, procedures, and tasks. In addition, a wide range of stimuli have been used in the study of emotion, including pictures of facial expressions, static pictures of emotional scenes, video clips, imagery inductions, nonlinguistic verbalizations, environmental sounds, prosody, and spoken and written words. One of the largest word sets is the Affective Norms for English Words (ANEW; Bradley & Lang, 1999), a set of 1,034 English words including verbs, nouns, and adjectives. ANEW has been characterized along the dimensions of valence, arousal, and dominance, as well as by word frequency. Dimensional norms, however, are only one of two general types of norms that are useful for characterizing affective stimuli. The other major approach involves classifying the stimulus set along emotional category lines. Providing these complementary data for the ANEW stimulus set would potentially open many new possibilities to researchers.Dimensional theories of affect have been shown to be most powerful when models include two categories, valence and arousal (Mehrabian & Russel, 1974;Smith & Ellsworth, 1985;Yik, Russell, & Barrett, 1999). Empirical applications of the dimensional model using words as stimuli have been successfully used in many studies. Behaviorally, positive and negative words elicit lower reaction times and higher accuracy than neutral words (Ali & Cimino, 1997;Borod, Andelman, Obler, Tweedy, & Welkowitz, 1992;Eviatar & Zaidel, 1991;Graves, Landis, & Goodglass, 1980;Inaba, Nomura, & Ohira, 2005;Kuchinke et al., 2005), and emotional words have been shown to induce emotional priming (Brouillet & Syssau, 2005;Carroll & Young, 2005;Van Strien & Morpurgo, 1992). Distinct neural correlates have been found that respond to changes in the valence level of words (Cato et al., 2004;Fossati et al., 2003;Kuchinke et al., 2005;Lewis, Critchley, Rotshtein, & Dolan, 2007), and these have been differentiated from neural correlates for which activation varies according to arousal (Lewis et al., 2007). Likewise, patients with brain lesions have shown specific deficits in responses to words and sentences of specific valences (Anderson & Phelps, 2001;Borod et al., 1992).Models of emotion based on discrete categories have also proved useful in empirical studies. These studies have focused on the use of facial expressions (Ekman, 1993) and static pictures (Bradley, Codispoti, Cuthbert, & Lang, 2001;Lang, Greenwald, Bradley, & Hamm, 1993;Mikels et al., 2005) to show differences in facial electromyography, heart rate, and electrodermal measures between different discrete emotions. Studies of brain-damaged patients have also revealed impairment in emotional recog- The Affective Norms for English Words (ANEW) are a commonly used set of 1,034 words characterized on the affective dimensions of valence, arousal, and dominance. Traditionally, studies of affect have used stimuli characterized along either affective dimensions or discrete emotional categories, but much current research...

Discrete emotion norms for nouns: Berlin affective word list (DENN–BAWL)

“…Descriptive statistics and bivariate correlations between the discrete emotion norms for happiness, anger, fear, disgust, and sadness are presented in Table 1. The bivariate correlations between the discrete emotion norms and valence respectively arousal norms taken from the BAWL-R replicate previous findings by Stevenson et al (2007). Interestingly, the present data further reveal a negative correlation between German happiness and arousal norms, which was not observed for English norms.…”

“…In order to investigate discrete emotion effects on single-word processing, however, researchers had to collect stimulus data on their own, since discrete emotion norms were not available (Armstrong et al, 2009;Parrott et al, 2005). This changed with the publication of supplementing norms for ANEW (Stevenson et al, 2007). Unlike dimensional norms, which are also available in Spanish (Redondo et al, 2007), Finish, British English (Eilola & Havelka, 2010), and German (Võ et al, 2006, currently, discrete emotion norms are available only in English.…”

“…Following Stevenson et al (2007), the present study meant to provide researchers with a list of reliable discrete emotion norms for German nouns, hereafter referred to as the DENN-BAWL. In a first step, the exact same discrete emotion categories to supplement the ANEW-namely happiness, anger, fear, disgust and sadness-were collected to supplement the BAWL.…”

“…To allow for a more complete view of the matter, supplemental material for the ANEW was recently published. Stevenson, Mikels, and James (2007) implemented discrete emotion norms for happiness, anger, fear, disgust, and sadness into the ANEW database based on classic discrete emotion models, as originally suggested by Charles Darwin (1872). Discrete emotions are a second major approach to conceptualize the affective space.…”

Cross-modal validation of the Leipzig Affective Norms for German (LANG)

“…We used this dimensional approach because it seems well suited to the characterization of word stimuli, for which it is difficult to always assign a primary emotional category (e.g., to words like "bomb, vacation, pizza"). However, we acknowledge attempts to use discrete emotional categories (Stevenson et al, 2007), and future studies could validate the affective norms in dimensional and categorical ratings.…”