Abstract
Despite flourishing research on the relationship between emotion and literal language, and despite the pervasiveness of figurative expressions in communication, the role of figurative language in conveying affect has been underinvestigated. This study provides affective and psycholinguistic norms for 619 German idiomatic expressions and explores the relationships between affective and psycholinguistic idiom properties. German native speakers rated each idiom for emotional valence, arousal, familiarity, semantic transparency, figurativeness, and concreteness. They also described the figurative meaning of each idiom and rated how confident they were about the attributed meaning. The results showed that idioms rated high in valence were also rated high in arousal. Negative idioms were rated as more arousing than positive ones, in line with results from single words. Furthermore, arousal correlated positively with figurativeness (supporting the idea that figurative expressions are more emotionally engaging than literal expressions) and with concreteness and semantic transparency. This suggests that idioms may convey a more direct reference to sensory representations, mediated by the meanings of their constituting words. Arousal correlated positively with familiarity. In addition, positive idioms were rated as more familiar than negative idioms. Finally, idioms without a literal counterpart were rated as more emotionally valenced and arousing than idioms with a literal counterpart. Although the meanings of ambiguous idioms were less correctly defined than those of unambiguous idioms, ambiguous idioms were rated as more concrete than unambiguous ones. We also discuss the relationships between the various psycholinguistic variables characterizing idioms, with reference to the literature on idiom structure and processing.
Highlights
In the last decade, a growing body of research on the relationships between language and affect has shown that the emotional content of words affects comprehension processes, challenging semantic models of word recognition and text comprehension that typically have not considered this important aspect (Jacobs, 2011; Jacobs et al, 2015)
Laden words show larger amplitudes of the event-related potential (ERP) components associated with emotional-stimulus processing; their processing is subserved by a network of brain regions functionally
Since normative studies on idiomatic expressions have not rated this variable, we briefly review the literature on single words
Summary
A growing body of research on the relationships between language and affect has shown that the emotional content of words affects comprehension processes, challenging semantic models of word recognition and text comprehension that typically have not considered this important aspect (Jacobs, 2011; Jacobs et al, 2015). According to dimensional models of affect, valence describes the extent to which a stimulus is positive or negative, and arousal refers to its degree of physiological activation (i.e., how calming or exciting/agitating a stimulus is; Lang, Bradley, & Cuthbert, 1997; Reisenzein, 1994; Russell, 2003). These dimensions typically show a quadratic relationship, whereby highly positive and negative stimuli are highly arousing, whereas emotionally neutral stimuli tend to be low in arousal (e.g., Bradley & Lang, 1999; Võ et al, 2009). These two dimensions show partial distinction, as evidenced by rating as well as neuroimaging studies (cf. Citron et al, 2014b; Lewis, Critchley, Rotshtein, & Dolan, 2007)
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