Discussion
\label{discussion}
Our study provides emotional valence norms for 1915 Spanish words, which
increases the amount of words with scores on this variable. The most
relevant question that addressed our research was the fact that little
or none studies have used Latin-American participants, which is an
aggregate value for our study. This is important in the sense that
differences may exist between Spaniard and Latin-American conceptual
processing of some words due to differences in cultural background,
which represent at the same time that some concepts may have different
meanings. One way to see this possible confounding is by observe some
special cases occurring with the Spanish association norms (Fernandez,
Diez, Alonso, & Beato, 2004) where, for example, for the word “BUS”,
the strongest associated word for Spaniard participants was “GUAGUA”
but for Colombians this word is hardly used and if so, it implies
another conceptual management. The correlation analysis went in the same
direction as it showed that despite the fact that it resulted highly
correlated, there seems to exist a subtle difference between some
concepts. It is true though that these two variables were not exactly
the same as it has been well stablished that agradability do not reflect
intrinsic attributes to the word but a personal point of view about the
physical experience of the emotion activated by the word.
Another step ahead for our study regarding to the available normative
studies was the use of an informatics tool both for presenting and
analysing the data. Generally normative studies have been performed
using a paper-pencil strategy, which is more time demanding. By using
the informatics approach researchers will be able to address more goals
in the same experimental sections and thus they will be able to provide
more controlled words to be used by cognitive researchers.
Currently, our lab is carrying out a series of studies that are intent
to address the question related to the impact of emotional valence on
recognition memory. As it was mentioned on the introduction of this
work, some researchers are interested in unravelling the relationships
between the cognitive and affective systems. For those researchers, this
study will represent a tool to be based on.
Finally, Affective system and its relationship with cognition is a
fruitful field for cognitive psychologist as it represents XXX. There is
not a good amount of researches in Latin America where emotion and
cognition have been implied. It is also true that there seems to be an
interest in starting new lines of research here in Latin-America so that
we can use the especial Latin-American context to address some research
questions. Is that the reason why our study can be suited to be used by
the researchers and thus XXX
Author notes
This study was funding by the research proyect….
A.M. González was recipient of a fellowship from the above mentioned
project
We want to thank XXXX for their invaluable participation and help
thorough the recollection data.