The Madrid Affective Database for Spanish (MADS): Ratings of Dominance, Familiarity, Subjective Age of Acquisition and Sensory Experience

Abstract

The current study presents ratings by 540 Spanish native speakers for dominance, familiarity, subjective age of acquisition (AoA), and sensory experience (SER) for the 875 Spanish words included in the Madrid Affective Database for Spanish (MADS). The norms can be downloaded as supplementary materials for this manuscript from https://figshare.com/s/8e7b445b729527262c88 These ratings may be of potential relevance to researches who are interested in characterizing the interplay between language and emotion. Additionally, with the aim of investigating how the affective features interact with the lexicosemantic properties of words, we performed correlational analyses between norms for familiarity, subjective AoA and SER, and scores for those affective variables which are currently included in the MADs. A distinct pattern of significant correlations with affective features was found for different lexicosemantic variables. These results show that familiarity, subjective AoA and SERs may have independent effects on the processing of emotional words. They also suggest that these psycholinguistic variables should be fully considered when formulating theoretical approaches to the processing of affective language.

EmoFinder: The meeting point for Spanish emotional words

“…1 Similarly, in their normative study involving a larger number of words (1,400), Guasch et al (2016) included ratings for the variables concreteness, imageability and context availability. Along similar lines, Hinojosa et al Hinojosa, Rincón-Pérez, et al, 2016) provided ratings of lexical and semantic variables. Thus, the 875 words included in their databases were also rated for concreteness , familiarity, age of acquisition and sensory experience (Hinojosa, Rincón-Pérez, et al, 2016).…”

“…Along similar lines, Hinojosa et al Hinojosa, Rincón-Pérez, et al, 2016) provided ratings of lexical and semantic variables. Thus, the 875 words included in their databases were also rated for concreteness , familiarity, age of acquisition and sensory experience (Hinojosa, Rincón-Pérez, et al, 2016). Since all these words were also rated for valence and arousal, the datasets here provide valuable data for the study of the relationship between affective and semantic properties.…”

“…Concerning the affective databases included in emoFinder, most of these have been compiled from a dimensional perspective, although two provide discrete emotion ratings instead. The databases that include ratings of the relevant variables from a dimensional perspective are those of Redondo et al (2005;Redondo et al, 2007), Ferré et al (2012), Guasch et al (2016), Hinojosa et al Hinojosa, Rincón-Pérez, et al, 2016), and Stadthagen-González et al (2017).…”

“…After Redondo et al (2005), these authors extended their previous work by adapting ANEW (Bradley & Lang, 1999) to Spanish (Redondo et al, 2007), thus providing normative data on valence, arousal, and dominance for the 1,034 words included in the original dataset. Similarly to Redondo et al (2007), the other databases included in emoFinder providing dimensional ratings also used SAM to obtain ratings of valence (Ferré et al, 2012;Guasch et al, 2016;, arousal (Ferré et al, 2012, Guasch et al, 2016, and dominance (Hinojosa, Rincón-Pérez, et al, 2016). The only exception is the database of Stadthagen-González et al (2017).…”

“…Concerning the former, Alonso et al (2015) provided subjective ratings of age of acquisition (AoA) for 7,039 Spanish words, a variable that has been related to word processing (see Juhasz, 2005, andJohnston &Barry, 2006, for reviews). In Spanish, there have been several normative studies on subjective AoA (Alonso, Díez, & Fernández, 2016;Alonso et al, 2015;González-Nosti, 2014;Hinojosa, Rincón-Pérez, et al, 2016;Moreno-Martínez, Montoro, & Rodríguez-Rojo, 2014). However, we have only included in emoFinder the datasets of Alonso et al (2015) and Hinojosa, Rincón-Pérez, et al (2016), because these two studies used a comparable 11-point rating scale, whereas the other studies used either a 7-point rating scale (González-Nosti et al, 2014;Moreno-Martínez et al, 2014) or no scale at all (Alonso et al, 2016).…”