Relationship between Properties of Words and Elicitation of Skin Conductance Response

Abstract

We investigated the association of subject-rated imagery, subject-rated concreteness, subject-rated emotionality, frequency, date of entry into the language, and word length with emotional imagery as measured by the skin conductance response elicited by that word. 50 words in a list of 25 word-pairs were rated by 96 university students; then their skin conductance response of each word was measured for each word. In each pair, one word was concrete and one was abstract but with related meaning, e.g., adolescent and adolescence. Stepwise multiple regression indicated that 30% of variance in the later skin conductance response was explained by imagery and subject-rated emotionality. Imagery alone explained 24% of variance.

Interest Value, Meaningfulness, and Familiarity of Words: Relations with other Word Properties

“…We next investigated the relations between the properties evaluated in the present study (Meaningfulness, Interest value, and Familiarity) and properties of the same words as assessed by us in previous studies, namely, Imagery value, Concreteness, Emotionahty, and Skin conductance response (Campos, et al, 1999a(Campos, et al, , 1999b, and with Frequency of use, Date of entry into Spanish, and Word Length (Table 1). Meaningfulness correlated significantly with Frequency of use, Imagery, Concreteness, and Skin conductance response.…”

“…Word Length was measured as number of letters (Rubin, 1980;Campos & Gonzdez, 1992;Campos, et al, 1999b). Date of entry into the Spanish language was defined as the earliest year mentioned for each word in the Brwe diccionario etimoh5gico de la lengua castellana (Corominas, 1983), and Frequency of use was taken from Alameda and Cuetos (1995).…”

“…Date of entry into the Spanish language was defined as the earliest year mentioned for each word in the Brwe diccionario etimoh5gico de la lengua castellana (Corominas, 1983), and Frequency of use was taken from Alameda and Cuetos (1995). Imagery value, Concreteness, and skin conductance response were taken from Campos, et al (1999a), and Emotionahty from Campos, et a/. (1999b).…”

“…We particularly focused on interest value, which has been little studied, and the relations of the three variables with a physiological variable that has not been considered previously in this context, the amplitude of skm conductance response. We used skin conductance response because the literature contains abundant documentation of the relation between emotional imagery and physiological activity (Miller, Levin, Kozark, Cook, McLean, & Lang, 1987;Yogo, Hama, Yogo, & Matsuyama, 1995;Campos, Marcos, & Gonzilez, 1999a, 1999b.…”

Methods for Studying the Psychophysiology of Emotion.

“…Manning and Melchiori (1974) observed similar patterns of SCRs when the stimuli were words rated as highly pleasant and unpleasant compared with neutral words. Campos, Marcos, and Gonzalez (1999) investigated how SCR related to different qualities of displayed words, and they found that 30% of the variance in SCR was explained by imagery and subject-rated emotionality of the displayed words.…”