Information about the affective meanings of words is used by researchers working on emotions and moods, word recognition and memory, and text-based sentiment analysis. Three components of emotions are traditionally distinguished: valence (the pleasantness of a stimulus), arousal (the intensity of emotion provoked by a stimulus), and dominance (the degree of control exerted by a stimulus). Thus far, nearly all research has been based on the ANEW norms collected by Bradley and Lang (1999) for 1,034 words. We extended that database to nearly 14,000 English lemmas, providing researchers with a much richer source of information, including gender, age, and educational differences in emotion norms. As an example of the new possibilities, we included stimuli from nearly all of the category norms (e.g., types of diseases, occupations, and taboo words) collected by Van Overschelde, Rawson, and Dunlosky (Journal of Memory and Language 50:289-335, 2004), making it possible to include affect in studies of semantic memory.

/pdf/norms-of-valence-arousal-and-dominance-for-13-915-english-gnh3edpo75.pdf

Norms of valence, arousal, and dominance for 13,915 English lemmas

Concreteness ratings are presented for 37,058 English words and 2,896 two-word expressions (such as zebra crossing and zoom in), obtained from over 4,000 participants by means of a norming study using Internet crowdsourcing for data collection. Although the instructions stressed that the assessment of word concreteness would be based on experiences involving all senses and motor responses, a comparison with the existing concreteness norms indicates that participants, as before, largely focused on visual and haptic experiences. The reported data set is a subset of a comprehensive list of English lemmas and contains all lemmas known by at least 85 % of the raters. It can be used in future research as a reference list of generally known English lemmas.

/pdf/concreteness-ratings-for-40-thousand-generally-known-english-2ttu2y40da.pdf

Concreteness ratings for 40 thousand generally known English word lemmas

Coming of age: a review of embodiment and the neuroscience of semantics.

How neurons make meaning: brain mechanisms for embodied and abstract-symbolic semantics

Neural correlates of written emotion word processing:a review of recent electrophysiological and hemodynamic neuroimaging studies

Although much is known about the representation and processing of concrete concepts, knowledge of what abstract semantics might be is severely limited. In this article we first address the adequacy of the 2 dominant accounts (dual coding theory and the context availability model) put forward in order to explain representation and processing differences between concrete and abstract words. We find that neither proposal can account for experimental findings and that this is, at least partly, because abstract words are considered to be unrelated to experiential information in both of these accounts. We then address a particular type of experiential information, emotional content, and demonstrate that it plays a crucial role in the processing and representation of abstract concepts: Statistically, abstract words are more emotionally valenced than are concrete words, and this accounts for a residual latency advantage for abstract words, when variables such as imageability (a construct derived from dual coding theory) and rated context availability are held constant. We conclude with a discussion of our novel hypothesis for embodied abstract semantics.

The representation of abstract words: why emotion matters

Kousta, Vigliocco, Vinson, Andrews, and Del Campo (2011) presented an embodied theory of semantic representation according to which, concrete concepts and words are grounded primarily in our experience with the physical environment around us, whereas abstract concepts and words are grounded primarily in our internal, affective states. The basis for this theoretical account is a behavioral investigation of the differences between concrete and

http://www.mjandrews.net/papers/vigliocco.jep.2013.pdf

Elena Del Campo

Papers

The representation of abstract words: why emotion matters

The Representation of Abstract Words: What Matters? Reply to Paivio's (2013) Comment on Kousta et al. (2011)