Affective Norms for 362 Persian Words

Abstract

Background : During the past two decades, a great deal of research has been conducted on developing affective norms for words in various languages, showing that there is an urgent need to create such norms in Persian language, too. The present study intended to develop a set of 362 Persian words rated according to their emotional valence, arousal, imageability, and familiarity so as to prepare the ground for further research on emotional word processing . This was the first attempt to set affective norms for Persian words in the realm of emotion. Methods: Prior to the study, a multitude of words were selected from Persian dictionary and academic books in Persian literature. Secondly, three independent proficient experts in the Persian literature were asked to extract the suitable words from the list and to choose the best (defined as grammatically correct and most often used). The database normalization process was based on the ratings by a total of 88 participants using a 9-point Likert scale. Each participant evaluated about 120 words on four different scales. Results: There were significant relationships between affective dimensions and some psycholinguistic variables. Also, further analyses were carried out to investigate the possible relationship between different features of valences (positive, negative, and neutral) and other variables included in the dataset. Conclusion: These affective norms for Persian words create a useful and valid dataset which will provide researchers with applying standard verbal materials as well as materials applied in other languages, e.g. English, German, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, etc.