The development of a corpus of emotional words produced by children and adolescents

Abstract

In order to develop a source of emotional words for use in studies of cognitive processing in children and adolescents, 221 students comprising 109 primary school students (62 girls and 47 boys) and 112 secondary school students (68 girls and 44 boys) were asked to imagine a scene about an emotional state, such as happiness, and then to generate as many single words as they could to describe this feeling. Subjects were also asked to generate words which would instigate this emotional state. Results showed that subjects produced around 21,000 words in total, with a mean of 96.78 (S.D.=34.68) per subject. Secondary school students produced significantly more words than primary school students in four categories: negative adjective, sad feeling, sad thing and scary thing. When subjects were divided into three age groups, the results revealed that subjects aged over 14 years produced significantly more words than two other groups aged less than 11 years and between 11 and 14 years. The oldest group also produced significantly more words than the other two groups in a number of categories. Girls produced significantly more words than boys. Girls also produced significantly more words in all categories except happy feeling and scary feeling. A corpus of the 25 most frequent words in each of the 10 categories is appended.