A Dictionary of Affect in Language: IV. Reliability, Validity, and Applications

Abstract

The 1984 Dictionary of Affect in Language by Sweeney and Whisseli includes more than 4,000 words which have been rated along the bipolar affective dimensions of Evaluation and Activation. A series of three experiments was conducted to evaluate the reliability and validity of the Dictionary and to improve its reliability by the inclusion of additional ratings. Exp. I, II, and III demonstrate the reliability of the Dictionary values and provide evidence of concurrent validity. A further series of three experiments (IV, V, VI) was designed to apply the Dictionary as a tool for assessing or preselecting the affective tone of words. Success (as defined by significant effects) is associated with the use of the Dictionary in choosing words for a verbal learning experiment (IV) and its use to score freely produced self-descriptive word lists (V) and the description of famous media characters (VI).

Emotions, Oral Arguments, and Supreme Court Decision Making

“…Linguists (Whissell et al 1986), sociolinguists (Eckert 1999), discourse analysts (Schiffrin 1994), and communications scholars (Robinson and Giles 2001) reach similar conclusions. They demonstrate words, and the emotions behind them, provide valuable insight into people's intentions, motives, and desires.…”

“…In other words, do justices telegraph or otherwise preview their preferences over the legal and policy outcomes of cases when they ask questions or make comments to attorneys who appear before them during oral arguments? To answer this question we draw insights from psychology, linguistics, and political science and utilize the Dictionary of Affect in Language (Whissell 1989;Whissell et al 1986) to analyze whether the emotional content of justices' questions during these proceedings can be used to predict how they will decide on the merits.…”

“…Transcripts in hand, we employ the Dictionary of Affect in Language (hereafter DAL) (Whissell 1989;Whissell et al 1986) to gauge the emotional content of the justices' words. Whissell (1989) argues that emotion in language can be described adequately and efficiently in terms of a two-dimensional space defined by the pleasantness and activation of words (see also Plutchik 1994;Russell 1978).…”

Linguistic Cues to Deception and Perceived Deception in Interview Dialogues

“…Included in this list are binary and numeric features capturing hedge words, filled pauses, laughter, complexity, contractions, and denials. We include Dictionary of Affect Language (DAL) (Whissell et al, 1986) scores that measure the emotional meaning of texts, and a specificity score which measures level of detail (Li and Nenkova, 2015). The full list of features is:…”

Negotiation Outcome Classification Using Language Features

“…With the training sample manually coded, a scoring model designed to estimate the integrative/distributive score using lexical features was created. The sample utterances were automatically parsed and tagged using the LDC (Zhou et al 2004a), the Whissell dictionary for affective words (Whissell 1989;Whissell et al 1986), the LIWC (Pennebaker et al 2007), and DAM (Stolcke et al 2000).…”