Abstract
Despite the flourishing research on the relationships between affect and language, the characteristics of pain-related words, a specific type of negative words, have never been systematically investigated from a psycholinguistic and emotional perspective, despite their psychological relevance. This study offers psycholinguistic, affective, and pain-related norms for words expressing physical and social pain. This may provide a useful tool for the selection of stimulus materials in future studies on negative emotions and/or pain. We explored the relationships between psycholinguistic, affective, and pain-related properties of 512 Italian words (nouns, adjectives, and verbs) conveying physical and social pain by asking 1020 Italian participants to provide ratings of Familiarity, Age of Acquisition, Imageability, Concreteness, Context Availability, Valence, Arousal, Pain-Relatedness, Intensity, and Unpleasantness. We also collected data concerning Length, Written Frequency (Subtlex-IT), N-Size, Orthographic Levenshtein Distance 20, Neighbor Mean Frequency, and Neighbor Maximum Frequency of each word. Interestingly, the words expressing social pain were rated as more negative, arousing, pain-related, and conveying more intense and unpleasant experiences than the words conveying physical pain.
Highlights
May words be painful? Undoubtedly yes and in several respects, as literary sources, personal experience, and a handful of recent behavioral and brain-imaging studies have shown (e.g., [1,2,3])
Across languages we extend the use of physical pain words to describe experiences of social pain (e.g., [5,58])
We explored the relationships among these variables unveiling
Summary
May words be painful? Undoubtedly yes and in several respects, as literary sources, personal experience, and a handful of recent behavioral and brain-imaging studies have shown (e.g., [1,2,3]). Words represent the main tool for describing the physical and social experience of pain (e.g., [4,5]) and can be metaphorically extended to characterize social phenomena, as exemplified by the title of a recent article in Science: “Growing pains for global monitoring of societal events” [6]. Norms about affectively-laden words already exist for a variety of languages, including. This study was devised to bridge this gap creating a normed corpus of Italian pain-related words (Words of Pain database, WOP). WOP may at the same time contribute to the literature on the characteristics of affectively-laden words and provide a tool for experimental studies of pain
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