Affective Norms for Italian Words in Older Adults: Age Differences in Ratings of Valence, Arousal and Dominance

Abstract

In line with the dimensional theory of emotional space, we developed affective norms for words rated in terms of valence, arousal and dominance in a group of older adults to complete the adaptation of the Affective Norms for English Words (ANEW) for Italian and to aid research on aging. Here, as in the original Italian ANEW database, participants evaluated valence, arousal, and dominance by means of the Self-Assessment Manikin (SAM) in a paper-and-pencil procedure. We observed high split-half reliabilities within the older sample and high correlations with the affective ratings of previous research, especially for valence, suggesting that there is large agreement among older adults within and across-languages. More importantly, we found high correlations between younger and older adults, showing that our data are generalizable across different ages. However, despite this across-ages accord, we obtained age-related differences on three affective dimensions for a great number of words. In particular, older adults rated as more arousing and more unpleasant a number of words that younger adults rated as moderately unpleasant and arousing in our previous affective norms. Moreover, older participants rated negative stimuli as more arousing and positive stimuli as less arousing than younger participants, thus leading to a less-curved distribution of ratings in the valence by arousal space. We also found more extreme ratings for older adults for the relationship between dominance and arousal: older adults gave lower dominance and higher arousal ratings for words rated by younger adults with middle dominance and arousal values. Together, these results suggest that our affective norms are reliable and can be confidently used to select words matched for the affective dimensions of valence, arousal and dominance across younger and older participants for future research in aging.

No grammatical gender effect on affective ratings: evidence from Italian and German languages

“…Thus, this result confirmed those described in previous sub-sections, indicating the absence of a reliable positive F-M difference in valence ratings for both languages. Table 1 reports the descriptive statistics for the affective ratings derived from the Italian ANEW adaptation for older adults (Fairfield et al, 2017). Again, the analyses on affective ratings supported the conclusions that no substantial feminine-related (positive) difference existed for the valence and no substantial masculine-related (negative) difference existed for the arousal and dominance ( Table 2).…”

“…German words from the German affective norms by Schmidtke and colleagues (2014) and for 1121 Italian words from the Italian adaptations of the ANEW (Fairfield et al, 2017;Montefinese et al, 2014b) obtained from younger (mean age: 22.27 years) and older (mean age: 69.36 years) adults, which also included 87 words derived from Italian semantic norms (Montefinese, Ambrosini, Fairfield, & Mammarella, 2013). We also extracted affective ratings separated by raters' sex gathered from the Italian younger adults (Montefinese et al, 2014b).…”

“…Thus, taken together, previous studies seem to suggest that grammatical gender can sometimes affect aspects of semantic representations, but only under some constraints. Further complicating matters, individuals' sex and age can affect grammatical gender effects in language use (see above), as well as word judgments on semantic differential scales reflecting the affective dimensions valence, arousal, and dominance 3 (see e.g., Fairfield, Ambrosini, Mammarella, & Montefinese, 2017;Montefinese, Ambrosini, Fairfield, & Mammarella, 2014b).…”

“…Here, we investigated grammatical gender effects on the semantic differential scales valence, arousal, and dominance in German and Italian speakers. In particular, we investigated within-and cross-languages grammatical gender effects and the interaction of grammatical gender with participants' sex and age (only for Italian speakers) (Fairfield et al, 2017;Montefinese et al, 2014b). We expect the coding of the grammatical gender to be not necessary to provide judgments about word affective features.…”

Forma mentis networks quantify crucial differences in STEM perception between students and experts

“…For English words in the researchers' forma mentis network, we used the affective ratings by Warriner and colleagues (Warriner et al, 2013), whereas for Italian words in the students' forma mentis network we used the valence norms recently gathered by Fairfield and colleagues (Fairfield, Ambrosini, Mammarella, & Montefinese, 2017).…”