title: The Emotion Word Fluency Test (EWFT): Initial psychometric, validation, and physiological evidence in young adults.
abstract: BACKGROUND
  The clinical assessment of affective functioning has been slow to incorporate findings from affective neuroscience. Of particular interest in the current study is the assessment of affective word production.
  
  
  METHODS
  In a series of four studies, we examined test-retest and interrater reliability for the Emotion Word Fluency Test (EWFT), basic construct validity with existing verbal fluency measures, physiological responses across verbal fluency tasks, and a novel scoring method to examine qualitative aspects of participant response sets.
  
  
  RESULTS
  Results demonstrated interrater and test-retest reliability values that were comparable to those of other commonly used verbal fluency tests. Construct validity was demonstrated by relations between the EWFT and other verbal fluency tests as well as through physiological evidence that performance on the EWFT is related to greater sympathetic activity than traditional verbal fluency tasks. Lastly, some of the novel scoring metrics related to two self-report measures of emotional functioning.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  Taken together, our findings provide initial support for the use of the EWFT as a measure of emotion word generation ability in young adults. This measure may prove to be useful in the assessment of affective language production in patient populations.
authors.affiliation: a Department of Psychology , University of Windsor , Windsor , ON , Canada.
authors.forename: Christopher A
authors.initials: CA
authors.lastname: Abeare
authors.affiliation: a Department of Psychology , University of Windsor , Windsor , ON , Canada.
authors.forename: Sabrina
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Freund
authors.affiliation: a Department of Psychology , University of Windsor , Windsor , ON , Canada.
authors.forename: Kristen
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Kaploun
authors.affiliation: a Department of Psychology , University of Windsor , Windsor , ON , Canada.
authors.forename: Tara
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: McAuley
authors.affiliation: b Department of Psychology Canandaigua Veterans Affairs Medical Center , Canandaigua , NY , USA.
authors.forename: Claudiu
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Dumitrescu
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D000339:Affect / Q000502:physiology*; D001007:Anxiety / Q000523:psychology; D001143:Arousal; D003863:Depression / Q000523:psychology; D004644:Emotions / Q000502:physiology*; D005260:Female; D005712:Galvanic Skin Response; D006801:Humans; D007807:Language Tests; D008297:Male; D001523:Mental Disorders / Q000523:psychology; D009483:Neuropsychological Tests; D015588:Observer Variation; D011594:Psychometrics; D015203:Reproducibility of Results; D057566:Self Report; D014705:Verbal Behavior; D055815:Young Adult
keywords: Affect; Emotion communication; Emotion word; Verbal fluency; Word generation