Abstract
The emotional response to a stimulus is typically measured in three variables called valence, arousal and dominance. Based on such dimensions, Bradley and Lang (1999) published the Affective Norms for English Words (ANEW), a corpus of affective ratings for 1,034 non-contextualized words. Expanded and adapted to many languages, ANEW provides a corpus to evaluate and to predict human responses to different stimuli, and it has been used in a number of studies involving analysis of emotions. However, ANEW seems not to appropriately predict affective responses to concepts when these are contextualized in certain situational backgrounds, in which words can have different connotations from those in non-contextualized scenarios. These contextualized affective norms have not been sufficiently contrasted yet because the literature does not provide a corpus of the ANEW list in specific contexts. On this basis, this paper reports on the creation of a new corpus of affective norms for the original 1,034 ANEW words in a particular context (a fictional scene of suspense). An extensive quantitative data analysis comparing both corpora was carried out, confirming that the affective ratings are highly influenced by the context. The corpus can be downloaded as Supplementary Material.
Highlights
The cognitive-affective theory claims that human emotional response to a stimulus is mainly determined by two different information-processing systems: (a) an automatic affective system, and (b) a cognitive processing system which evaluates the information related to the stimulus (Mischel and Shoda, 1995; Moors et al, 2013)
The mean correlations between groups were high for all affective dimensions: 0.93 for valence, 0.87 for arousal, and 0.85 for dominance
The results offer an explanation for the high correlation found in the Spanish S-Affective Norms for English Words (ANEW) scores against the suspense ratings published in Delatorre et al (2017)
Summary
The cognitive-affective theory claims that human emotional response to a stimulus is mainly determined by two different information-processing systems: (a) an automatic affective system, and (b) a cognitive processing system which evaluates the information related to the stimulus (Mischel and Shoda, 1995; Moors et al, 2013). Positive/negative valence or high arousal terms seem to have a greater emotional impact than neutral terms (Maratos et al, 2000; Hamann and Mao, 2002) These terms are more vividly remembered (Kensinger and Corkin, 2003). The emotional response is influenced by the context in which the terms are introduced (Bokde et al, 2001; Buchanan et al, 2006; Kousta et al, 2011) This content is determinant to attribute their semantic and, the subjective values of their affective features (Sperber et al, 1979; Pearson, 1998; Shaikh et al, 2007; Barrett and Kensinger, 2010)
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