No Self Without Salience: Affective and Self-relevance Ratings of 552 Emotionally Valenced and Neutral Dutch Words

Lora I Dimitrova,Hedwig Hofstetter,Eline M Vissia,Antje A T S Reinders,Sima Chalavi,Hanneke Geugies

doi:10.1007/s10936-021-09784-1

Abstract

It is unknown how self-relevance is dependent on emotional salience. Emotional salience encompasses an individual's degree of attraction or aversion to emotionally-valenced information. The current study investigated the interconnection between self and salience through the evaluation of emotional valence and self-relevance. 56 native Dutch participants completed a questionnaire assessing valence, intensity, and self-relevance of 552 Dutch nouns and verbs. One-way repeated-measures ANCOVA investigated the relationship between valence and self, age and gender. Repeated-measures ANCOVA also tested the relationship between valence and self with intensity ratings and effects of gender and age. Results showed a significant main effect of valence for self-relevant words. Intensity analyses showed a main effect of valence but not of self-relevance. There were no significant effects of gender and age. The most important finding presents that self-relevance is dependent on valence. These findings concerning the relationship between self and salience opens avenues to study an individual's self-definition.

Highlights

Interest among researchers in the concept of self and self-relevance is growing (e.g. Crocetti et al, 2015)
Out of the 552 words, 20 were deemed unsuitable for reliability testing due to missing values and were omitted from the analysis, which resulted in a final of 532 items on the valence scale being examined, obtaining a very high reliability rating of α = 0.967
The self-relevance scale obtained an alpha of α = 0.987, with 548 items examined and an exclusion of four words for missing data

Summary

Introduction

Interest among researchers in the concept of self and self-relevance is growing (e.g. Crocetti et al, 2015). In the field of emotion research, certain aspects of self-relevance can be investigated by the use of standardized, validated affective stimuli sets, e.g. pictures (Gruhn & Scheibe, 2008), sounds (Bradley & Lang, 2000) or words (Bradley & Lang, 1999; Fields & Kuperberg, 2016). These stimuli are usually obtained in an English setting and their applicability to other languages and cultures remains unknown

Methods

Results

Conclusion