The bright side of words: Norms for 9000 Spanish words in seven discrete positive emotions

Abstract

In recent years, assumptions about the existence of a single construct of happiness that accounts for all positive emotions have been questioned. Instead, several discrete positive emotions with their own neurobiological and psychological mechanisms have been proposed. Of note, the effects of positive emotions on language processing are not yet properly understood. Here we provide a database for a large set of 9000 Spanish words scored by 3437 participants in the positive emotions of awe, contentment, amusement, excitement, serenity, relief, and pleasure. We also report significant correlations between discrete positive emotions and several affective (e.g., valence, arousal, happiness, negative discrete emotions) and lexico-semantic (e.g., frequency of use, familiarity, concreteness, age of acquisition) characteristics of words. Finally, we analyze differences between words conveying a single emotion (“pure” emotion words) and those denoting more than one emotion (“mixed” emotion words). This study will provide researchers a rich source of information to do research that contributes to expanding the current knowledge on the role of positive emotions in language. The norms are available at https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.21533571.v2

Statistical Relationships Between Phonological Form, Emotional Valence and Arousal of Spanish Words

“…In contrast, we found differences in how the final phoneme is stressed for valence and more extensive associations between form and affective meaning in Spanish than English. A promising avenue for future research might entail investigating systematic mappings between forms and affective connotations for basic or discrete emotions (e.g., happiness, anger, disgust) for which norms in Spanish are now available for 9000 words (e.g., Calvillo-Torres et al, 2024;Hinojosa et al, 2023).…”

“…Past work in Spanish has tended to show that lexical frequency is positively correlated with valence (e.g., Hinojosa et al, 2016aHinojosa et al, , 2023Pérez-Sánchez et al, 2021;Stadthagen-Gonzalez et al, 2017) although results for arousal have been mixed with some studies reporting negative correlations (e.g., Hinojosa et al, 2016aHinojosa et al, , 2023Stadthagen-Gonzalez et al, 2017) and others positive ones (e.g., Guasch et al, 2016;Pérez-Sánchez et al, 2021). In addition, age-of-acquisition (AoA) is positively correlated with arousal ratings but negatively correlated with valence (e.g., Hinojosa et al, 2016bHinojosa et al, , 2023Pérez-Sánchez et al, 2021;Stadthagen-Gonzalez et al, 2017; but see Pérez-Sánchez et al, 2021 who failed to observe a significant correlation with arousal). Significant negative correlations have also been reported between concreteness/imageability and valence (e.g., Hinojosa et al, 2023;Pérez-Sánchez et al, 2021;Stadthagen-Gonzalez et al, 2017) and positive correlations with familiarity (e.g., Hinojosa et al, 2023;Stadthagen-Gonzalez et al, 2017).…”

“…In addition, age-of-acquisition (AoA) is positively correlated with arousal ratings but negatively correlated with valence (e.g., Hinojosa et al, 2016bHinojosa et al, , 2023Pérez-Sánchez et al, 2021;Stadthagen-Gonzalez et al, 2017; but see Pérez-Sánchez et al, 2021 who failed to observe a significant correlation with arousal). Significant negative correlations have also been reported between concreteness/imageability and valence (e.g., Hinojosa et al, 2023;Pérez-Sánchez et al, 2021;Stadthagen-Gonzalez et al, 2017) and positive correlations with familiarity (e.g., Hinojosa et al, 2023;Stadthagen-Gonzalez et al, 2017). Conversely, arousal has been reported to be negatively correlated with both familiarity and concreteness/imageability (e.g., Guasch et al, 2016;Stadthagen-Gonzalez et al, 2017; but see Pérez-Sánchez et al, 2021 who failed to observe a significant correlation between concreteness and arousal).…”

A shared structure for emotion experiences from narratives, videos, and everyday life

“…For instance, discrete emotions have been reported to account for variance that is not captured by the standard valence and arousal scales—but on studies of response times to single words, 34 which are a very different dependent measure in a very different task context than self-report of subjective feelings. Of course, all stimuli can be rated on discrete emotions, and such databases (including the ones we used for narratives 18 and videos, 10 as well as a number of others for single words in a range of different languages 35 , 36 , 37 , 38 , 39 ) provide complementary characterizations of stimuli on discrete emotion labels beyond standard affective dimensions, such as valence and arousal. In fact, we included both discrete emotions and dimensional features in the present study and asked whether such emotion labels and the concepts they denote, when applied specifically to emotion experience as induced by potent stimuli, reveal a more continuous dimensional space or discrete clusters.…”