Abstract
Language-and culture-specific norms are needed for research on emotion-laden stimuli. We present valence and arousal ratings for 420 Finnish nouns for a sample of 996 Finnish speakers. Ratings are provided both for the whole sample and for subgroups divided by age and gender in light of previous research suggesting age- and gender-specific reactivity to the emotional content in stimuli. Moreover, corpus-based frequency values and word length are provided as objective psycholinguistic measures of the nouns. The relationship between valence and arousal mainly showed the curvilinear relationship reported in previous studies. Age and gender effects on valence and arousal ratings were statistically significant but weak. The inherent affective properties of the words in terms of mean valence and arousal ratings explained more of the variance in the ratings. In all, the findings suggest that language- and culture-related factors influence the way affective properties of words are rated to a greater degree than demographic factors. This database will provide researchers with normative data for Finnish emotion-laden and emotionally neutral words. The normative database is available in Database S1.
Highlights
There is ample evidence to suggest that words with emotional content are processed differently than emotionally neutral words
The second aim of the study was to examine the characteristics of the word ratings in this database by analyzing (a) the distribution of the ratings in the affective space, (b) possible ageand gender-related differences in mean valence and arousal ratings for all words and for words categorized by their mean valence ratings, and (c) the relationship between the ratings in this study and the ratings in previous studies using the same words [11,12], [14]
As depicted in the right-hand area of Figure 1, the arousal ratings of the positive nouns were more evenly distributed over the arousal scale compared to those of the negative nouns
Summary
There is ample evidence to suggest that words with emotional content are processed differently than emotionally neutral words. The processing specificity for emotional content in words has been demonstrated at a behavioral level [1], in electrophysiological studies, and in functional brain imaging studies (for a review, see [2]). This effect has been found in research on the interaction between cognitive and affective processes, for example in studies examining the effects of emotion on memory [1], [3] and word recognition latencies [1], [4]. The most commonly employed theory in this regard has been the dimensional model for emotional content in stimuli. The term valence is used to indicate whether the stimulus is perceived as positive/pleasant, neutral, or negative/unpleasant, whereas the term arousal is used to indicate whether the stimulus is perceived as exciting/arousing or calming
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