Pleasantness and Emotionality of Words: Relation When Stimuli are Controlled

Abstract

We affirm that there is no correlation between values of pleasantness-unpleasantness and emotionality; however, the level of pleasantness and of unpleasantness influence the intensity of emotionality. We presented four lists of-words (concrete-pleasant, concrete-unpleasant, abstract-pleasant, abstract-unpleasant) to 120 subjects who scored each word on two scales, pleasantness and emotionality. We obtained a correlation of .01 between the two variables; however, we found a positive correlation (.55) when we used pleasant words and a negative correlation (−.58) when we used unpleasant words.