The adaptation of the Affective Norms for English Words (ANEW) for Italian

Abstract

We developed affective norms for 1,121 Italian words in order to provide researchers with a highly controlled tool for the study of verbal processing. This database was developed from translations of the 1,034 English words present in the Affective Norms for English Words (ANEW; Bradley & Lang, 1999) and from words taken from Italian semantic norms (Montefinese, Ambrosini, Fairfield, & Mammarella, Behavior Research Methods, 45, 440-461, 2013). Participants evaluated valence, arousal, and dominance using the Self-Assessment Manikin (SAM) in a Web survey procedure. Participants also provided evaluations of three subjective psycholinguistic indexes (familiarity, imageability, and concreteness), and five objective psycholinguistic indexes (e.g., word frequency) were also included in the resulting database in order to further characterize the Italian words. We obtained a typical quadratic relation between valence and arousal, in line with previous findings. We also tested the reliability of the present ANEW adaptation for Italian by comparing it to previous affective databases and performing split-half correlations for each variable. We found high split-half correlations within our sample and high correlations between our ratings and those of previous studies, confirming the validity of the adaptation of ANEW for Italian. This database of affective norms provides a tool for future research about the effects of emotion on human cognition.

Norms of valence and arousal for 14,031 Spanish words

“…In general, our data show the same patterns as those reported by Warriner et al (2013; see also Montefinese et al, 2014). As frequency, familiarity, imageability or concreteness of a word increase, the valence rating of that word increases, but the arousal rating decreases.…”

“…Raters for Arousal had an average age of 22 years 5 months (range= 18 to 62 years; SD= 5 years 8 months). The dominance of female participants is in line with current practice in psychological experiments and is acceptable given the high correlation of valence and arousal ratings provided by males and females (Montefinese et al, 2014;Moors et al, 2013). Still, it is fair to say that the present data may not be the most optimal to predict the responses of an all-male participant group 1 .…”

“…The dimensional model of emotions originally proposed by Wundt includes, along with valence and arousal, a third variable: dominance; a subjective assessment of how "in control" a word makes you feel. However, this third variable has not been widely used in the literature (Montefinese, Ambrosini, Fairfield, & Mammarella, 2014), is not a strong predictor of variance of affective judgments (Bradley & Lang, 1994;Lang, Bradley, & Cuthbert, 2008), and is strongly correlated with valence (Warriner, Kuperman, & Brysbaert, 2013).…”

“…Norms of affective properties of words have been published in multiple languages such as European Portuguese (Soares, Comesaña, Pinheiro, Simões, & Frade, 2012), Brazilian Portuguese (Kristensen, de Azevedo Gomes, Justo, & Vieira, 2011), French (Monnier & Syssau, 2013;Bonin, et al, 2003;Gilet, Grühn, Studer, and Labouvie-Vief, 2012, among others), German (Kanske & Kotz, 2010;Lahl, Göritz, Pietrowsky, & Rosenberg, 2009;Võ et al, 2009;Võ, Jacobs, & Conrad, 2006), Polish (Imbir, 2015), Finnish (Söderholm, Häyry, Laine, & Karrasch, 2013;Eilola & Havelka, 2010), Italian (Montefinese, Ambrosini, Fairfield, & Mammarella, 2014) and Dutch (Moors et al, 2013). In Spanish, the largest set of emotional norms so far was published in Redondo, Fraga, Padrón, & Comesaña (2007), which includes valence, arousal, and dominance norms for the Spanish translation equivalents of the original 1034 items from ANEW using a method very similar to that in Bradley & Lang (1999).…”

Spanish norms for affective and lexico-semantic variables for 1,400 words

“…In the normative studies investigating the affective properties of words, the most-used scale has been the Self-Assessment Manikin (SAM; Bradley & Lang, 1994), which is composed of 9 points accompanied by characters depicting the different anchor points. For the sake of comparability, and following the common procedure in the field (e.g., Ferré et al, 2012;Montefinese, Ambrosini, Fairfield, & Mammarella, 2014;Redondo et al, 2007;Soares, Comesaña, Pinheiro, Simões, & Frade, 2012;Söderholm, Häyry, Laine, & Karrasch, 2013), we adopted SAM as the rating scale, too. Participants rated the valences of words on a 9-point Likert scale ranging from completely sad(1) to completely happy(9).…”