On the Association between the Pleasantness and Meaningfulness of Words

Abstract

To study the associations between the pleasantness and meaningfulness of words of four classes (pleasant and concrete, unpleasant and concrete, pleasant and abstract, unpleasant and abstract), we presented a 20-word list for each class to 184 subjects who rated the words for pleasantness and reported associations for calculation of word meaningfulness. Within both the concrete and abstract groups, pleasantness and meaningfulness were positively correlated for pleasant words and negatively correlated for unpleasant words. Although none of these correlations was statistically significant, all four (−.51 to .18) were stronger than the over-all correlation of 06 between pleasantness and meaningfulness for the 80-word pool.