Abstract
AbstractExemplars of concepts vary in their degree of prototypicality. This is also true for emotion concepts. This study presents prototypicality ratings for a large set of Chinese words. The database contains 636 potential Chinese emotion words (i.e., words that directly express particular emotions, like “高兴 happy” and “哀愁 sad”), from different grammatical categories. Native Chinese speakers rated the words in terms of emotional prototypicality. The database also contains values for valence, arousal, and emotionality. The analyses of the ratings revealed that 502 out of 636 words had a high prototypicality value (value equal to or above three on a 1-to-5 scale), the most prototypical words being negative and high-arousal words. The analyses also indicated that the emotional prototypicality of a word was positively related to both arousal and emotionality, and negatively related to valence. Among these variables, arousal was the most important contributor. Similar results have been found in studies conducted in other languages. This will be a useful resource for researchers interested in studying emotion words in the Chinese language and for those interested in cross-linguistic comparisons.
Funder
Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation
Universitat Rovira i Virgili
Publisher
Springer Science and Business Media LLC
Subject
General Psychology,Linguistics and Language,Language and Linguistics,Experimental and Cognitive Psychology
Reference66 articles.
1. Alonso-Arbiol, I., Shaver, P. R., Fraley, R. C., Oronoz, B., Unzurrunzaga, E., & Urizar, R. (2006). Structure of the Basque emotion lexicon. Cognition & Emotion, 20(6), 836–865. https://doi.org/10.1080/02699930500405469
2. Barca, L., Burani, C., & Arduino, L. (2002). Word naming times and psycholinguistic norms for Italian nouns. Behavior Research Methods, Instruments, & Computers, 34(3), 424–434. https://doi.org/10.3758/bf03195471
3. Barrett, L. F. (1998). Discrete emotions or dimensions? The role of valence focus and arousal focus. Cognition and Emotion, 12(4), 579–599. https://doi.org/10.1080/026999398379574
4. Bestelmeyer, P., Kotz, S., & Belin, P. (2017). Effects of emotional valence and arousal on the voice perception network. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, 12(8), 1351–1358. https://doi.org/10.1093/scan/nsx059
5. Bradley, M. M., & Lang, P. J. (1999). Affective norms for English words (ANEW): Instruction manual and affective ratings (Vol. 30, No. 1, pp. 25–36). Technical report C-1, the center for research in psychophysiology, University of Florida.