The emotion potential of words and passages in reading Harry Potter – An fMRI study

Hsu, Chun-Ting; Jacobs, Arthur; Citron, Francesca; Conrad, Markus

doi:10.1016/j.bandl.2015.01.011

Cited by 113 publications

(90 citation statements)

References 121 publications

(190 reference statements)

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“…At the neuronal level, the liking of (short) stories and text passages has been associated with bilateral medial prefrontal cortex, supramarginal gyrus/temporoparietal junction, and left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (Altmann et al, 2012), the left posterior middle temporal gyrus (Hsu et al, 2015), and the medial frontal cortex (Lehne et al, 2015 8 ).…”

Section: Multiword Expressionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

On Elementary Affective Decisions: To Like Or Not to Like, That Is the Question

2016

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Perhaps the most ubiquitous and basic affective decision of daily life is deciding whether we like or dislike something/somebody, or, in terms of psychological emotion theories, whether the object/subject has positive or negative valence. Indeed, people constantly make such liking decisions within a glimpse and, importantly, often without expecting any obvious benefit or knowing the exact reasons for their judgment. In this paper, we review research on such elementary affective decisions (EADs) that entail no direct overt reward with a special focus on Neurocognitive Poetics and discuss methods and models for investigating the neuronal and cognitive-affective bases of EADs to verbal materials with differing degrees of complexity. In line with evolutionary and appraisal theories of (aesthetic) emotions and data from recent neurocognitive studies, the results of a decision tree modeling approach simulating EADs to single words suggest that a main driving force behind EADs is the extent to which such high-dimensional stimuli are associated with the “basic” emotions joy/happiness and disgust.

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Section: Multiword Expressionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

On Elementary Affective Decisions: To Like Or Not to Like, That Is the Question

2016

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“…Lexical affective meaning has been shown to be of reliable predictive potential for the affective perception of different types of texts (Anderson and McMaster, 1982; Whissell et al, 1986; Bestgen, 1994; Whissell, 1994; Hsu et al, 2015a). The importance of lexical affective meaning is increasingly stressed in sentiment analyses of online social media texts (Thelwall et al, 2010; Paltoglou, 2014).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Hence, large-scale affective word databases have been gathered to provide normative affective ratings for several thousand words from a given language (English: e.g., ANEW: Bradley and Lang, 1999; DAL: Sweeney and Whissell, 1984; Whissell, 2009; German: e.g., BAWL: Võ et al, 2006, 2009; Jacobs et al, 2015; ANGST: Schmidtke et al, 2014a; also see Schauenburg et al, 2014). For examples of usages, see, for instance, Kuchinke et al (2005); Hofmann et al (2009); Scott et al (2009); Conrad et al (2011); Palazova et al (2011); Hsu et al (2014, 2015a,b,c); Recio et al (2014). …”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

On the Relation between the General Affective Meaning and the Basic Sublexical, Lexical, and Inter-lexical Features of Poetic Texts—A Case Study Using 57 Poems of H. M. Enzensberger

et al. 2017

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The literary genre of poetry is inherently related to the expression and elicitation of emotion via both content and form. To explore the nature of this affective impact at an extremely basic textual level, we collected ratings on eight different general affective meaning scales—valence, arousal, friendliness, sadness, spitefulness, poeticity, onomatopoeia, and liking—for 57 German poems (“die verteidigung der wölfe”) which the contemporary author H. M. Enzensberger had labeled as either “friendly,” “sad,” or “spiteful.” Following Jakobson's (1960) view on the vivid interplay of hierarchical text levels, we used multiple regression analyses to explore the specific influences of affective features from three different text levels (sublexical, lexical, and inter-lexical) on the perceived general affective meaning of the poems using three types of predictors: (1) Lexical predictor variables capturing the mean valence and arousal potential of words; (2) Inter-lexical predictors quantifying peaks, ranges, and dynamic changes within the lexical affective content; (3) Sublexical measures of basic affective tone according to sound-meaning correspondences at the sublexical level (see Aryani et al., 2016). We find the lexical predictors to account for a major amount of up to 50% of the variance in affective ratings. Moreover, inter-lexical and sublexical predictors account for a large portion of additional variance in the perceived general affective meaning. Together, the affective properties of all used textual features account for 43–70% of the variance in the affective ratings and still for 23–48% of the variance in the more abstract aesthetic ratings. In sum, our approach represents a novel method that successfully relates a prominent part of variance in perceived general affective meaning in this corpus of German poems to quantitative estimates of affective properties of textual components at the sublexical, lexical, and inter-lexical level.

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“…Emotionally laden words influence a number of cognitive processes, such as lexical decision [1–4], reading [5,6] and memory [7,8]. More importantly, the affective appraisal of words varies from one culture to another [9], as well as between languages [10].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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

et al. 2017

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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.

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The emotion potential of words and passages in reading Harry Potter – An fMRI study

Cited by 113 publications

References 121 publications

On Elementary Affective Decisions: To Like Or Not to Like, That Is the Question

On Elementary Affective Decisions: To Like Or Not to Like, That Is the Question

On the Relation between the General Affective Meaning and the Basic Sublexical, Lexical, and Inter-lexical Features of Poetic Texts—A Case Study Using 57 Poems of H. M. Enzensberger

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

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