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).