The Nencki Affective Picture System (NAPS): a Children-Rated Subset

Abstract

Emotion research in children should make use of emotional stimuli ideally coming from children-rated databases. However, most of the works in this area use adult-rated stimuli databases or a collection of stimuli taken from the Internet or from unidentified sources without any standardization procedure or content control for children population. These issues result in an overall lack of control over the kind of emotion to be elicited, leading to limited results. Therefore, in this work, a children-rated picture subset taken from the adult-rated Nencki Affective Picture System (NAPS) set is proposed as a stimuli database for emotion research in children. The NAPS is a standardized set of 1356 realistic, high-quality photographs classified into five categories (people, faces, animals, objects, and landscapes), and up to now, normative ratings were only collected in an adult population. The proposed subset in this work contains 1128 pictures taken from the original database which are developmentally appropriate for children based on different criteria and an expert's judgment procedure. Affective ratings were collected from a sample of 266 children 8-12 years old. With this work, both the availability and quality of affective stimuli for the study of emotion in children are directly improved.

Psychological Applications and Trends 2022

“…Our results extending this period of age. On contrary to Zamora et al (2020) and Cordon et al (2013) studies which did not report age-related differences, our study suggests a development of emotional valence discrimination also for pictures. In addition, our results indicated that emotional valence discrimination is modulated by the modality of the stimulus (i.e., words or pictures) and the kind of emotional valence to process (i.e., negative or neutral or positive).…”

“…For pictures, three studies investigated age or sex differences on children's emotional ratings. For age, Zamora, et al (2020) did not observed significant age-related differences in valence ratings between 8-to 10-year-old children and 10-to12-year-old ones. McManis et al (2001), observed that children (7-to 11-year-old) and teenagers (12-to 14-year-old) showed similar valence ratings of pictures than adults did.…”

Perceptual, cognitive and response inhibition in emotional contexts in children.

“…All the stimuli used in the tasks are from the NAPS, although for copyright reasons others were given as an example in the tasks. Prior to using the pictures with the sample of children, we rated the pictures for valence and arousal by testing Argentinian children of the same age groups on a 5-point (1–5) Likert scale (Zamora et al, in press).…”

Investigation of Relationships between Discrete and Dimensional Emotion Models in Affective Picture Databases Using Unsupervised Machine Learning

“…Finally, Children-Rated Subset is the most recent extension of NAPS and includes 1128 images from the original database that were rated as appropriate for children based on various criteria and expert judgment. In the Children-Rated Subset, affective ratings were collected from a sample of N = 266 children aged 8-12 years [44].…”