Pleasant Words: Relation with Concreteness and Imagery Values When Stimuli are Controlled

Abstract

We affirm, contrary to the opinion of some authors, that there is no correlation between values of pleasantness and values of concreteness of words, and we also affirm that there is no correlation between pleasant and imagery values of words. The fact that a word is pleasant or unpleasant depends on the meaning of a word. The concrete level only influences so a pleasant word is more pleasant and an unpleasant word is more unpleasant. The imagery value of a word does not influence in the fact that a word is pleasant or unpleasant. It will only influence the intensity of the pleasant or the unpleasant. We presented four lists of words (concrete-pleasant, concrete-unpleasant, abstract-pleasant, abstract-unpleasant) to 160 students who scored each word on three scales, pleasantness, imagery and concreteness. We obtained correlations of −.05 between pleasantness and concreteness and of .05 between pleasantness and imagery; however, we found a positive correlation between pleasantness and concreteness and also between pleasantness and imagery when we used pleasant words; a negative correlation obtained when we used unpleasant words.