Norms of Emotional Valence for 1915 Spanish Words Obtained in Latin-American Population

\label{norms-of-emotional-valence-for-1915-spanish-words-obtained-in-latin-american-population}
The study of cognition has been taken place for more than 50 years and yet still scientists are unravelling the mysteries of human cognition. Indeed, researchers have advance quite a lot in understanding the functioning of cognitive domains such as memory, language or attention, but there is still an imperious need to go further in order to accomplish the difficult task of explaining how our minds work. In order to do so, it is crucial to have the best tools in order to minimize the role that error plays in the explanation of how we process information.
Most of the above mentioned goals have been reached by using words as experimental material. However, words have some particular characteristics that can influence the way humans can process information. Therefore, if these characteristics are not controlled it can be a real problem to understand the possible outputs steaming from its uncontrolled use.
Words’ attributes can be intrinsic or relational. Thus, attributes such as word frequency, concreteness, age of acquisition, length or emotional valence represent the word formal structure, whereas associative relationship (best known as associative strength) reflects a word link to another one (Hutchison, 2003).
There have been a lot of reports that have shown that the words attributes can affect the way we process them. Frequency effect (Bybee, 2007; Ellis, 2002), concreteness (Altarriba, Bauer, & Benvenuto, 1999; Holmes & Langford, 1976; Jessen et al., 2000; Xiao, Zhao, Zhang, & Guo, 2012) age of acquisition (Barry, Morrison, & Ellis, 1997; Bird, Franklin, & Howard, 2001; Morrison, Ellis, & Quinlan, 1992), word length (Baddeley, Thomson, & Buchanan, 1975; Pérez, 2007) or emotional valence (Kousta, Vigliocco, Vinson, Andrews, & Del Campo, 2011; Lane, Chua, & Dolan, 1999; León et al., 2010; Nielen et al., 2009; Piguet, Connally, Krendl, Huot, & Corkin, 2008; Rozenkrants & Polich, 2008; Stevenson, Mikels, & James, 2007) have been some of the effect describing the modulation of cognitive processing.

Emotional Valence

\label{emotional-valence}
As mentioned before, emotion plays an important role in modulation cognitive processing (). Researchers have been interested in providing new evidence that help to comprehend this relationship as it seems to be determinant in facilitating memory consolidation (), lexical access () or simply emotional processing (). Up-to-date, there is still no agreement about the way emotion works. There are a bunch of theories that are split into <<<< DESARROLLO DE LA TEORÍA EMOCIONAL>>>

Normative data in Spanish for emotion

\label{normative-data-in-spanish-for-emotion}
In the review of Perez () there are only few studies of emotion norms, and none of them have gotten ratings in emotional valence with Latin-American populations. Despite of using the same language, persons’ cultural background can make language comprehension a bit difficult.
IN Algarabel study they count with Agradability for emotion processing, but that variable is not the same as emotional valence in spite of been highly correlated. Nelson defines Agradability as ….. while james describes Emotional valence as the grade a word can have within a continuum that varies from negative to positive (including neutral words)
As mentioned before, there is a worldwide interest in order to advance in the knowledge of both affective and cognitive system. To do that researchers will need the best tools, especially if they are going to consider testing populations where Spanish can vary, such as in Latin American countries. So this study was aimed at collecting emotional valence norm for a subset of 1917 Spanish words previously used in a mayor normative study that collected norms for imageability, concreteness, synonymous and agradability (Algarabel, 1996).