A comparison of two lists providing emotional norms for English words (ANEW and the DAL).
Although different in terms of purpose, word-selection procedures, and rating scales, both the ANEW (n = 1034) and DAL (n = 8742) lists, which have 633 words in common, provide normative emotional ratings for English words. This research compared the lists and cross-validated the two main lexical dimensions of affect. Parallel representatives of the two dimensions (Valence and Pleasantness, Arousal and Activation) were correlated across lists (rs = .86, .63). In tune with their separate purposes, the ANEW list, which was designed to describe emotional words, included more rare words, while the DAL, which was designed for natural language applications, included more common ones. The Valence-Activation scatterplot for ANEW was C-shaped and included fewer Arousing words of medium Valence, such as "awake," "debate," and "proves," while the DAL included fewer less common words descriptive of emotion such as "maniac," "corrupt," and "lavish." In view of these differences, list similarities strongly support the generalizability of the two main lexical dimensions of affect.
Whissell
Cynthia
C
Psychology Department, Laurentian University, Sudbury, Ontario, Canada P3E 2C6. cwhissell@laurentian.ca
D000339:Affect; D001143:Arousal; D001288:Attention; D004014:Dictionaries as Topic; D004644:Emotions; D006801:Humans; D007802:Language; D008960:Models, Psychological; D009323:Natural Language Processing; D010700:Phonetics; D025341:Principal Component Analysis; D011578:Psycholinguistics / Q000706:statistics & numerical data; D015203:Reproducibility of Results; D012660:Semantics