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

Abstract

During social communication, words and sentences play a critical role in the expression of emotional meaning. The Minho Affective Sentences (MAS) were developed to respond to the lack of a standardized sentence battery with normative affective ratings: 192 neutral, positive, and negative declarative sentences were strictly controlled for psycholinguistic variables such as numbers of words and letters and per-million word frequency. The sentences were designed to represent examples of each of the five basic emotions (anger, sadness, disgust, fear, and happiness) and of neutral situations. These sentences were presented to 536 participants who rated the stimuli using both dimensional and categorical measures of emotions. Sex differences were also explored. Additionally, we probed how personality, empathy, and mood from a subset of 40 participants modulated the affective ratings. Our results confirmed that the MAS affective norms are valid measures to guide the selection of stimuli for experimental studies of emotion. The combination of dimensional and categorical ratings provided a more finegrained characterization of the affective properties of the sentences. Moreover, the affective ratings of positive and negative sentences were not only modulated by participants' sex, but also by individual differences in empathy and mood state. Together, our results indicate that, in their quest to reveal the neurofunctional underpinnings of verbal emotional processing, researchers should consider not only the role of sex, but also of interindividual differences in empathy and mood states, in responses to the emotional meaning of sentences.

Concurrent emotional response and semantic unification: An event-related potential study

“…Specifically, participants' ability or tendency to see things from others' perspective (as measured by the perspective-taking subscale) correlated with the emotional effect within the 300-to 1,000-ms time window. This correlation is consistent with the finding that increased empathetic perspective taking was associated with less pleasant and more arousing ratings of sad sentences (Pinheiro, Dias, Pedrosa, & Soares, 2016). In addition, participants' tendency to imaginatively transpose themselves into fictional situations (as measured by the fantasy subscale) correlated with the emotional effect within the 300-to 600-ms time window.…”

The Affective Norms for Polish Short Texts (ANPST) Database Properties and Impact of Participants’ Population and Sex on Affective Ratings

“…The Affective Norms for English Texts dataset provides normative ratings of perceived valence, arousal and dominance (measured with use of SAM scales) for a set of sentences and brief texts in the English language. Recently the Minho Affective Sentences dataset ( Pinheiro et al, 2016 ) was introduced; this is a set of 192 sentences covering five basic emotional states (anger, fear, disgust, sadness, and happiness) and control/neutral stimuli in European Portuguese. Sentences were assessed by 536 native speakers of European Portuguese with respect to valence, arousal, and dominance using nine-point SAM scales ( Pinheiro et al, 2016 ).…”

Affective Norms for 718 Polish Short Texts (ANPST): Dataset with Affective Ratings for Valence, Arousal, Dominance, Origin, Subjective Significance and Source Dimensions

“…Short texts or sentences are a useful method for complex affective process elicitation due to their context information that results from sentence structure ( Pinheiro et al, 2016 ). For example, the word “infection” may be judged as evoking negative feelings, or in some cases treated as a quite neutral medical term.…”

“…To date there have been only a few databases containing research materials in form of short texts (cf. Bradley and Lang, 2007 ; Pinheiro et al, 2016 ). The motivation in introducing Affective Norms for Polish Short Texts (ANPST) was to provide short texts and their reliable affective ratings done by Polish participants.…”