Norms of valence, arousal, and dominance for 13,915 English lemmas

5956 German affective norms for atmospheres in organizations (GANAiO)

This article develops a comprehensive database comprising 5956 German affective norms specifically tailored for the study of organizational atmospheres through computational verbal language analysis. This dictionary adopts both dimensional and categorical approaches. The theoretical foundation of this study is the circumplex model of affective atmospheres. Similar to established methodologies, each word is rated based on the dimensions of valence and arousal. Going beyond the dimensional approach, this article introduces a classification system with 11 distinct atmospheric categories, assigning the words to their corresponding categories. This dictionary represents the first attempt to apply computer-aided text analysis (CATA) to the study of organizational atmospheres, providing a practical tool to support research in this developing area.

BRAND: Brand recognition and attitude norms database

Research involving brands has increased substantially in recent decades. However, no extensive and free dataset of consumer responses to branding stimuli exists. The present research develops and validates such a dataset, which we call the Brand Recognition and Attitude Norms Database (BRAND). BRAND is the most comprehensive set of methodologically transparent, freely available, research-relevant consumer responses to branding stimuli, with measures of familiarity (awareness), liking (attitudes), and memory (recognition) of more than 500 top brands and their logos, spanning 32 industries. BRAND includes 5,356 primary datapoints aggregated from 244,400 raw datapoints (i.e., individual familiarity, liking, and memory responses) collected from 2000 US-resident consumers in 2 years (i.e., 2020 and 2024). The data exhibit good reliability, face validity, external validity, robustness across samples and time, cross-validity, and discriminant validity. BRAND can be broadly useful for testing hypotheses involving responses to brands, and for selecting stimuli in any study involving brands or logos. Thus, BRAND can facilitate research not only in consumer behavior and psychology but also in several related academic disciplines (e.g., economics, management, marketing).

DerLex: An eye-movement database of derived word reading in English

This paper introduces a new database of eye-tracking data on English derived words, DerLex. A total of 598 unique derived suffixed words were embedded in sentences and read by 357 participants representing both university convenience pools and community pools of non-college-bound adults. Besides the eye-movement record of reading derived suffixed words, the DerLex database provides the author recognition test (ART) scores for each participant, tapping into their reading proficiency, as well as multiple lexical variables reflecting distributional, orthographic, phonological, and semantic features of the words, their constituent morphemes, and morphological families. The paper additionally reports the main effects of select lexical variables and their interactions with the ART scores. It also produces estimates of statistical power and sample sizes required to reliably detect those lexical effects. While some effects are robust and can be readily detected even in a small-scale typical experiment, the over-powered DerLex database does not offer sufficient power to detect many other effects-including those of theoretical importance for existing accounts of morphological processing. We believe that both the availability of the new data resource and the limitations it provides for the planning and design of upcoming experiments are useful for future research on morphological complexity.

Exploring the differences in processing between Chinese emotion and emotion-laden words: A cross-task comparison study

Affective words can be classified into two types: emotion words (EM words, e.g., "happy") and emotion-laden words (EL words, e.g., "wedding"). Several studies have shown differences in processing between EM and EL words, although results are inconclusive. These two types of words may have representational differences because affective content is an inherent part of the semantic features of EM words (i.e., denotative meaning) but not of EL words, whose affective content is part of their connotative meaning (i.e., these words do not name emotions, but are associated with emotions). In this study, we tested a set of Chinese EM and EL words. Both conditions included positive and negative words. The study involved two tasks, an implicit task, in which emotional content was not relevant (lexical decision task, LDT), and an explicit task, in which the emotional content was relevant (affective categorisation task, ACT). Our results showed that participants responded faster to EM words than to EL words. This advantage was mostly observed in the ACT and with negative words. These results reveal differences in processing between EM and EL words which can be related to the greater relevance of affective content in the meaning of EM words compared with EL words.

When abstract becomes concrete, naturalistic encoding of concepts in the brain

Language is acquired and processed in complex and dynamic naturalistic contexts, involving the simultaneous processing of connected speech, faces, bodies, objects, etc. How words and their associated concepts are encoded in the brain during real-world processing is still unknown. Here, the representational structure of concrete and abstract concepts was investigated during movie watching to address the extent to which brain responses dynamically change depending on visual context. First, across contexts, concrete and abstract concepts are shown to encode different experience-based information in separable sets of brain regions. However, these differences are reduced when multimodal context is considered. Specifically, the response profile of abstract words becomes more concrete-like when these are processed in visual scenes highly related to their meaning. Conversely, when the visual context is unrelated to a given concrete word, the activation pattern resembles more that of abstract conceptual processing. These results suggest that while concepts generally encode habitual experiences, the underlying neurobiological organisation is not fixed but depends dynamically on available contextual information.

Using large language models to estimate features of multi-word expressions: Concreteness, valence, arousal

This study investigates the potential of large language models (LLMs) to provide accurate estimates of concreteness, valence, and arousal for multi-word expressions. Unlike previous artificial intelligence (AI) methods, LLMs can capture the nuanced meanings of multi-word expressions. We systematically evaluated GPT-4o's ability to predict concreteness, valence, and arousal. In Study 1, GPT-4o showed strong correlations with human concreteness ratings (r = .8) for multi-word expressions. In Study 2, these findings were repeated for valence and arousal ratings of individual words, matching or outperforming previous AI models. Studies 3-5 extended the valence and arousal analysis to multi-word expressions and showed good validity of the LLM-generated estimates for these stimuli as well. To help researchers with stimulus selection, we provide datasets with LLM-generated norms of concreteness, valence, and arousal for 126,397 English single words and 63,680 multi-word expressions.

Affective Norms for German as a Second Language (ANGL2)

The present study introduces affective norms for a set of 880 German words rated by learners of German as a second language (L2), i.e., the Affective Norms for German as a Second Language (ANGL2). The database provides ratings across affective and subjective psycholinguistic dimensions. Besides valence and arousal ratings, ANGL2 features data on emotional prototypicality, which helps to identify emotion-label words and emotion-laden words. Moreover, the database includes two additional semantic variables: concreteness and familiarity. We observed similarities with previous studies, and the ratings provided by L2 speakers demonstrate characteristics that should be noted in studies involving bilinguals, including more moderate valence ratings, and a stronger correlation between valence and arousal, specifically for positive words. ANGL2 is the first set of affective norms that has been rated by L2 speakers for a language other than English. The set of norms is aimed to function as a resource for psycholinguistic experimental studies on the intersection between emotion and language among L2 speakers.

The role of individual differences in emotional word recognition: Insights from a large-scale lexical decision study

This work presents a large lexical decision mega-study in Spanish, with 918 participants and 7500 words, focusing on emotional content and individual differences. The main objective was to investigate how emotional valence and arousal influence word recognition, controlling for a large number of confounding variables. In addition, as a unique contribution, the study examined the modulation of these effects by individual differences. Results indicated a significant effect of valence and arousal on lexical decision times, with an interaction between these variables. A linear effect of valence was observed, with slower recognition times for negative words and faster recognition times for positive words. In addition, arousal showed opposite effects in positive and negative words. Importantly, the effect of emotional variables was affected by personality traits (extroversion, conscientiousness and openness to experience), age and gender, challenging the 'one-size-fits-all' interpretation of emotional word processing. All data collected in the study is available to the research community: https://osf.io/cbtqy . This includes data from each participant (RTs, errors and individual differences scores), as well as values of concreteness (n = 1690), familiarity (n = 1693) and age of acquisition (n = 2171) of the words collected exclusively for this study. This is a useful resource for researchers interested not only in emotional word processing, but also in lexical processing in general and the influence of individual differences.

The Affect Misattribution Procedure Revisited: An Informational Account

The aim of this research was to test an informational explanation of the effects observed in the affect misattribution procedure (AMP). According to this explanation, participants performing the AMP would simplify the task by asking whether the target is pleasant (yes vs. no) and would use the affective information provided by the prime to answer the question (positive = yes, negative = no). In line with this proposition, we observed in three preregistered experiments that slightly modifying the response options proposed in the task moderated the effect, which can be canceled (Experiment 1) and even reversed (Experiments 2 and 3). These results are consistent with the informational explanation and seem difficult to explain by the operation of misattribution processes.

Affective, semantic, frequency, and descriptive norms for 107 face emojis

We introduce a novel dataset of affective, semantic, and descriptive norms for all facial emojis at the point of data collection. We gathered and examined subjective ratings of emojis from 138 German speakers along five essential dimensions: valence, arousal, familiarity, clarity, and visual complexity. Additionally, we provide absolute frequency counts of emoji use, drawn from an extensive Twitter corpus, as well as a much smaller WhatsApp database. Our results replicate the well-established quadratic relationship between arousal and valence of lexical items, also known for words. We also report associations among the variables: for example, the subjective familiarity of an emoji is strongly correlated with its usage frequency, and positively associated with its emotional valence and clarity of meaning. We establish the meanings associated with face emojis, by asking participants for up to three descriptions for each emoji. Using this linguistic data, we computed vector embeddings for each emoji, enabling an exploration of their distribution within the semantic space. Our description-based emoji vector embeddings not only capture typical meaning components of emojis, such as their valence, but also surpass simple definitions and direct emoji2vec models in reflecting the semantic relationship between emojis and words. Our dataset stands out due to its robust reliability and validity. This new semantic norm for face emojis impacts the future design of highly controlled experiments focused on the cognitive processing of emojis, their lexical representation, and their linguistic properties.

Relating Tabooness to Humor and Arousal Ratings in American English: What the F*** Is so Funny?

Emotion can have a profound effect on language processing, and taboo words have been increasingly used in research as highly emotional, negatively valenced stimuli. However, because taboo words as a lexical category are socially constructed and semantically idiosyncratic, they may also have complex emotional characteristics. This complexity may not be fully considered by researchers using taboo words as research stimuli. This study gathered tabooness, humor, and arousal ratings to provide a resource for researchers to better understand the sources and characteristics of the strong emotions generated by taboo words. A total of 411 participants aged 18-83 were recruited via online platforms, and all participants rated the same 264 words on tabooness, humor, and arousal. Analyses indicated that tabooness and humor ratings were positively related to each other, and both were predicted by arousal ratings. The set of ratings included here provides a tool for researchers using taboo stimuli, and our findings highlight methodological considerations while broadening our understanding of the cognitive and linguistic nature of highly emotional language.

Linguistic markedness and body specificity in parity judgments: evidence from a go/no-go task

In two experiments we tested the contribution of linguistic markedness and affective evaluation (i.e., body specificity) to the representation of abstract numerical concepts, such as parity. To this end, we employed speeded parity judgments of digits (Exp 1) or number words (Exp 2) in a go/no-go task. Fifty right-handed participants completed four blocks of trials in each experiment. In two blocks, they responded to even numbers (2, 4, 6, or 8) and in the other two blocks they responded to odd numbers (1, 3, 7, or 9). In each pair of blocks, they responded once with their right hand and once with their left hand. Results revealed faster right-hand responses to even than to odd digits (Exp 1), and faster left-hand response to odd than to even number words (Exp 2). In addition, in both experiments, we found faster responses to small-odd than large-odd digits and number words. The results support the conclusion that the affective evaluation of parity and linguistic markedness makes independent contributions to the representation of parity.

Long-term cognitive and affective consequences of mild traumatic brain injury: comparison with older adults

OBJECTIVE

Memory and affective processing were compared in young adults with a remote mild traumatic brain injury (mTBI), to healthy younger and older adults. We evaluated memory performance when encoding was done under multi-tasking (divided attention) conditions, likely to exacerbate cognitive and psychological symptoms in mTBI.

METHODS

Participants studied pairs of unrelated words under either full or divided attention conditions. Memory for single words (item memory) and for pairs of words (associative memory) was then assessed in sequential independent recognition tests, under full attention.

RESULTS

Associative memory was poorer than item memory, and worse when encoding was done under divided than full attention. The decline in recognition accuracy from full to divided attention conditions on the associative memory test was significantly greater in mTBI compared to young adults and was similar in magnitude to that observed in older adults under full attention. Self-reported mental and total fatigue increased significantly as performance on the memory tests, following the divided attention condition, decreased, but only in the mTBI group.

CONCLUSIONS

Results show lingering memory deficits, and suggest that cognitive tasks may be experienced as psychologically more demanding in those with a mTBI, even months or years after injury.

Recalling more each time: context change effects in hypermnesia

Hypermnesia, the increase in recall over trials without relearning or re-exposure to the studied items, has intrigued researchers since Ballard first reported the effect in 1913. In the typical hypermnesia study, additional retrieval trials are unexpected, and when announced, may induce context changes that re-focuses attention and effort on retrieving unrecalled items. The present studies examined the effects of context change on retrieval by telling some participants prior to study (trials-known condition) that three trials will be given to recall line drawings (Experiment 1) or words (Experiment 2) whereas others were not so informed (hypermnesia condition). Results of Experiment 1 revealed hypermnesia but no between-group differences on the sub-processes of item gains, losses, or intrusions. In Experiment 2, hypermnesia and between-group differences were found for item gains and intrusions, results that were marginally significant when data were aggregated across both experiments. Results are discussed in terms of the change in cue set hypothesis (Raaijmakers & Shiffrin, 1980) and the effects of internal and external context changes on hypermnesia. Suggestions for future studies are also presented.

Specificity ratings for English data

A dataset of specificity ratings for English words is hereby presented, analyzed and discussed in relation with other collections of speaker-generated ratings, including concreteness. Both, specificity and concreteness are analyzed in their ability to explain decision latencies in lexical and semantic tasks, showing important individual contributions. Specificity ratings are collected through best-worst scaling method on the words included in the ANEW dataset (Bradley and Lang in Affective norms for English words (ANEW): instruction manual and affective ratings (Tech. Rep.). Technical report C-1, the center for research in psychophysiology, 1999), chosen for its compatibility with many other collections of rating resources, and for its comparability with Italian specificity data (Bolognesi and Caselli in Behav Res Methods 55(7):3531-3548, 2023), allowing for cross-linguistic comparisons. Results suggest that specificity plays an important role in word processing and the importance of taking specificity into consideration when investigating concreteness effects.

Neural Representations of Concreteness and Concrete Concepts Are Specific to the Individual

Different people listening to the same story may converge upon a largely shared interpretation while still developing idiosyncratic experiences atop that shared foundation. What linguistic properties support this individualized experience of natural language? Here, we investigate how the "concrete-abstract" axis-the extent to which a word is grounded in sensory experience-relates to within- and across-subject variability in the neural representations of language. Leveraging a dataset of human participants of both sexes who each listened to four auditory stories while undergoing functional magnetic resonance imaging, we demonstrate that neural representations of "concreteness" are both reliable across stories and relatively unique to individuals, while neural representations of "abstractness" are variable both within individuals and across the population. Using natural language processing tools, we show that concrete words exhibit similar neural representations despite spanning larger distances within a high-dimensional semantic space, which potentially reflects an underlying representational signature of sensory experience-namely, imageability-shared by concrete words but absent from abstract words. Our findings situate the concrete-abstract axis as a core dimension that supports both shared and individualized representations of natural language.

Skin conductance response and habituation to emotional facial expressions and words

Skin conductance response (SCR) serves as a dependable marker of sympathetic activation used to measure emotional arousal. This study investigates the impact of presentation modality (face or word) on the degree of emotional discrimination elicited by SCR. Facial expressions or words associated with six basic emotions-anger, happiness, disgust, fear, sadness, and surprise-were studied among 102 participants. The amplitude of SCR was accurately predicted by subjective arousal ratings of these stimuli, but not by valence ratings. The habituation process to emotional and neutral stimuli across six successive presentations was characterized by an exponential decay function, capturing the rate at which SCR response diminishes in relation to the preceding trial of the same stimulus. Through the subtraction of the response to neutral stimuli from the emotion-evoked SCR, it was demonstrated that the initial presentation of each emotion elicits a substantial response, particularly attributable to the emotional content. Notably, the initial emotional response to faces expressing happiness, disgust, and sadness surpassed that of words conveying the same emotions. The results indicate that different emotional responses can be quantified using a simple electrical instrument.

A multinational analysis of how emotions relate to economic decisions regarding time or risk

Emotions have been theorized to be important drivers of economic choices, such as intertemporal or risky decisions. Our systematic review and meta-analysis of the previous literature (378 results and 50,972 participants) indicates that the empirical basis for these claims is mixed and the cross-cultural generalizability of these claims has yet to be systematically tested. We analysed a dataset with representative samples from 74 countries (n = 77,242), providing a multinational test of theoretical claims that individuals' ongoing emotional states predict their economic preferences regarding time or risk. Overall, more positive self-reported emotions generally predicted a willingness to wait for delayed rewards or to take favourable risks, in line with some existing theories. Contrary to the assumption of a universal relationship between emotions and decision-making, we show that these relationships vary substantially and systematically across countries. Emotions were stronger predictors of economic decisions in more economically developed and individualistic countries.

Remembering change: Interdependence between change awareness and meaningful connection in achieving proactive facilitation

Two experiments investigated proactive facilitation (PF) or proactive interference (PI) in the recall of recently learned targets, under conditions of assessing the detection and recollection of target changes across two learning phases (with A-B/A-D word pairs). Some changes established meaningful connections across the phases; others did not. Task instructions on the subsequent cued-recall test (Experiment 1) or during Phase 2 study (Experiment 2) guided participants (university students) to monitor and report the changes. Accuracy in cued recall conditionalized on measures of change awareness replicated previous findings in establishing conditions for PF and PI. However, PF was much reduced for unconnected materials. Moreover, when change recollection failed, PI occurred even under conditions of meaningful connections (Experiment 1). Discussion emphasizes this interdependence of meaningfulness of connections and change awareness in influencing whether and how memory for earlier events affects memory for more recent ones.

Selective Brain Activations and Connectivities Related to the Storage and Recall of Human Object-Location, Reward-Location, and Word-Pair Episodic Memories

Different cortical systems to the hippocampus were activated using fMRI during different types of episodic memory task. For object with scene location episodic memory, the activations were high in cortical systems involved in spatial processing, including the ventromedial visual and medial parahippocampal system. These activations for the medial parahippocampal system were higher in the right hemisphere. The activations in the face and object processing ventrolateral visual cortical stream regions FFC, PIT, V8 and TE2p were higher in the object-location in scene task than the reward-location task, and were higher in the right hemisphere. For reward-location in scene episodic memory, activations were also high in the ventromedial visual cortical spatial stream to the hippocampus, but were also selectively high in storage in key reward cortical regions (ventromedial prefrontal 10r, 10v, 10d; pregenual anterior cingulate d32, p24, p32, s32; and medial orbitofrontal cortex reward-related pOFC, 11l, OFC). For word-pair episodic memory, activations were lower in the ventromedial visual and medial parahippocampal spatial cortical stream, and were higher in language-related regions in Broca's area (44, 45, 47l), and were higher in the left hemisphere for these regions and for the many highly connected inferior frontal gyrus regions in the left hemisphere. Further, effective connectivity analyses during the episodic memory tasks showed that the direction of connectivity for these systems was from early visual cortical regions V2-V4 to the ventromedial visual cortical regions VMV1-3 and VVC for spatial scene processing; was from the pregenual anterior cingulate and orbitofrontal cortex reward systems to the hippocampal system; and was from the FFC/V8/PIT system to TE2p in the visual inferior temporal visual cortex, which has connectivity to lateral parahippocampal TF, which in turn has forward effective connectivity to the hippocampus.

Revisiting the concreteness effect: Non-arbitrary mappings between form and concreteness of English words influence lexical processing

How do we represent and process abstract and concrete concepts? The "concreteness effect", in which words with more concrete meanings are processed more quickly and accurately across a range of language tasks compared to abstract ones, suggests a differential conceptual organization of these words in the brain. However, concrete words tend to be marked by specific phonotactic features, such as having fewer syllables and more phonological neighbours. It is unclear whether these non-arbitrary form-meaning relationships that systematically denote the concreteness of a word impact language processing. In the current study, we first establish the extent of systematic mappings between phonological/phonetic features and concreteness ratings in a large set of monosyllabic and polysyllabic English words (i.e., concreteness form typicality), then demonstrate that they significantly influence lexical processing using behavioural megastudy datasets. Surface form features predicted a significant proportion of variance in concreteness ratings of monomorphemic words (25 %) which increased with the addition of polymorphemic forms (43 %). In addition, concreteness form typicality was a significant predictor of performance on visual and auditory lexical decision, naming, and semantic (concrete/abstract) decision tasks, after controlling for a range of psycholinguistic variables and concreteness ratings. Overall, our results provide the first evidence that concreteness form typicality influences lexical processing. We discuss theoretical implications for interpretations of the concreteness effect and models of language processing that have yet to incorporate non-arbitrary relationships between form and meaning into their feature sets.

Implicit memory reduced selectively for negative words with aging

Background

Disproportionally better memory for positive versus negative information (mnemonic positivity effect, MPE) in older versus younger adults has been reported on tests of explicit memory (direct, intentional) as measured by recall and recognition. The purpose of this investigation was to examine whether the MPE would be observed for implicit memory (indirect, unintentional) under conditions where, based on previous research using single words, it was expected that the MPE for explicit memory would be absent.

Methods

This study investigated the influence of age on explicit and implicit memory for positive, negative, and neutral single words as measured by yes/no recognition and word identification on 24 older adults (aged 66-85) and 24 younger adults (aged 18-37) recruited from community centers in South Boston, Massachusetts.

Results

Older adults had lower recognition memory accuracy for positive, negative, and neutral words than younger adults, and, consistent with most prior studies, did not exhibit an explicit memory MPE for single words. For both groups, recognition accuracy was greatest for negative words, and was similar for positive and neutral words. In contrast, older adults exhibited implicit repetition priming, as measured by superior identification performance for repeated words, that was similar to younger adults for positive and neutral words. In younger adults, implicit memory was significantly greater for negative words than for positive and neutral words, whereas in older adults there were no significant differences in implicit memory for negative, positive, and neutral words. Therefore, selectively reduced priming for negative words in older adults was found in the context of enhanced priming for negative words in the younger adults.

Conclusion

These findings show that there was an implicit memory MPE in older adults for words even under conditions where there was no explicit memory MPE in the older adults. Dampening of negative valence implicit memory with aging expands the perimeter of the age-related positivity framework.

Emojis and affective priming in visual word recognition

Emojis are frequently used in digital communication to supplement the lack of non-verbal cues, but their integration during reading has not been thoroughly examined. This study explores the interplay between language and emotion by testing the influence of emotional valence and face-status of emojis on visual word recognition. Two online experiments were conducted with 92 native English-speaking university students, examining priming effects between congruent (e.g. [Formula: see text] delicious) and incongruent (e.g. [Formula: see text] hate) prime-target pairs, varying the face-status of the emoji prime (face vs. non-face) and the valence (positive vs. negative) of the word target. Irrespective of valence, face emojis demonstrated a processing advantage over non-face emojis, implying automatic attention capture. Additionally, the results revealed an interaction between prime-target congruency and valence, with a facilitatory effect for positive, but not negative, items, suggesting a valence-specific mechanism of affective priming in the lexical decision task. The research suggests that the rapid integration of emoji content occurs during the early stages of visual word recognition, with heightened attentional sensitivity to both face-like and positive stimuli when reading digital communications.

Similar, not universal: the cognitive dimensions of conceptual prototypes of basic emotions in English and in Polish

The current study explores the differences in conceptualisation of the prototypical basic emotion lexicalisations (anger, disgust, fear, joy, sadness, surprise) in English and in Polish. Measures of concreteness, imageability and context availability were collected and analysed across the six semantic categories of basic emotions, across different parts of speech and between the self-determined genders of the study participants. The initial results indicate that within these cognitive dimensions the conceptualisations of basic emotions in English and in Polish are only similar on the more general but not the higher levels of conceptualisation. The folk-psychological division between positive and negative emotions and the grammatical parts of speech reveal similar patterns in basic emotion concepts in both Polish and in English. However, on the higher levels of conceptualisations that include specific basic emotion semantic categories and self-identified gender, marked language-specific differences become apparent. Different negative emotions drive the statistical differences in Polish and in English, and the gender effects on the measures of concreteness, imageability and context availability are opposite from one language to the other. In other words, basic emotions may be broadly mutually intelligible, but not exactly the same when communicated across languages and cultures.

Effortful retrieval of semantic memories induces forgetting of related negative and neutral episodic memories

Retrieval-induced forgetting (RIF) experiments show that the act of retrieving some recently encoded items from a given conceptual category leads to greater forgetting of competing items from that same category. However, RIF studies using emotional stimuli have produced mixed results, perhaps due to the reinstatement of arousal or negative affect during retrieval practice. To induce forgetting of negative episodic memories more indirectly, we examined if retrieving neutral semantic memories leads to RIF of related negative memories. In two experiments, participants studied eight categorized lists comprised of an equal number of negative and neutral words (Experiment 1) or neutral words preceded by neutral or negative images (Experiment 2). To avoid re-exposing individuals to negative material during retrieval practice, participants then performed a semantic memory retrieval task in which they generated (i.e., completed word-stems for) new neutral words from half of the studied categories. We found that semantic retrieval, or word generation, induced forgetting of recently studied words irrespective of their emotional valence or original emotional context. Additionally, across both experiments, less successful word generation was associated with stronger RIF effects. In Experiment 2, the magnitude of RIF was also correlated with higher subjective ratings of retrieval effort during word generation. Together, these results suggest that even when retrieving neutral semantic memories, effortful retrieval may enhance inhibitory processes that lead to forgetting of both neutral and negative episodic memories.

Decoding the essence of two-character Chinese words: Unveiling valence, arousal, concreteness, familiarity, and imageability through word norming

Investigation of affective and semantic dimensions of words is essential for studying word processing. In this study, we expanded Tse et al.'s (Behav Res Methods 49:1503-1519, 2017; Behav Res Methods 55:4382-4402, 2023) Chinese Lexicon Project by norming five word dimensions (valence, arousal, familiarity, concreteness, and imageability) for over 25,000 two-character Chinese words presented in traditional script. Through regression models that controlled for other variables, we examined the relationships among these dimensions. We included ambiguity, quantified by the standard deviation of the ratings of a given lexical variable across different raters, as separate variables (e.g., valence ambiguity) to explore their connections with other variables. The intensity-ambiguity relationships (i.e., between normed variables and their ambiguities, like valence with valence ambiguity) were also examined. In these analyses with a large pool of words and controlling for other lexical variables, we replicated the asymmetric U-shaped valence-arousal relationship, which was moderated by valence and arousal ambiguities. We also observed a curvilinear relationship between valence and familiarity and between valence and concreteness. Replicating Brainerd et al.'s (J Exp Psychol Gen 150:1476-1499, 2021; J Mem Lang 121:104286, 2021) quadratic intensity-ambiguity relationships, we found that the ambiguity of valence, arousal, concreteness, and imageability decreases as the value of these variables is extremely low or extremely high, although this was not generalized to familiarity. While concreteness and imageability were strongly correlated, they displayed different relationships with arousal, valence, familiarity, and valence ambiguity, suggesting their distinct conceptual nature. These findings further our understanding of the affective and semantic dimensions of two-character Chinese words. The normed values of all these variables can be accessed via https://osf.io/hwkv7 .

Unseen but influential associates: Properties of words' associates influence lexical and semantic processing

In many models of lexical and semantic processing, it is assumed that single word processing is a function of the characteristics of the words presented and the distributional properties of the words' networks. Recent research suggests that semantic characteristics of a target word's associates may in fact influence target-word responses in lexical-semantic tasks. The present study extends that previous research to examine whether lexical and semantic properties of target-word associates are recruited during lexical and semantic decision tasks, and whether the type of associate information recruited varies as a function of task and concreteness of the target word. We found that lexical-semantic properties of words' first associates are related to accuracy of responses to words in lexical decision, and that semantic properties of words' first associates are related to both response time and accuracy in semantic decision. Further, these effects differ depending on the target word's concreteness. These findings provide new insight about the way words' associates contribute to semantic representation and processing, even though the associates are not actually presented, moving beyond previous assumptions about lexical-semantic processing of single words.

Naming in a multilingual context: Norms for the ICMR-Manipal colour picture corpus in Kannada from the Indian context

There have been many published picture corpora. However, more than half of the world's population speaks more than one language and, as language and culture are intertwined, some of the items from a picture corpus designed for a given language in a particular culture may not fit another culture (with the same or different language). There is also an awareness that language research can gain from the study of bi-/multilingual individuals who are immersed in multilingual contexts that foster inter-language interactions. Consequently, we developed a relatively large corpus of pictures (663 nouns, 96 verbs) and collected normative data from multilingual speakers of Kannada (a southern Indian language) on two picture-related measures (name agreement, image agreement) and three word-related measures (familiarity, subjective frequency, age of acquisition), and report objective visual complexity and syllable count of the words. Naming labels were classified into words from the target language (i.e., Kannada), cognates (borrowed from/shared with another language), translation equivalents, and elaborations. The picture corpus had > 85% mean concept agreement with multiple acceptable names (1-7 naming labels) for each concept. The mean percentage name agreement for the modal name was > 70%, with H-statistics of 0.89 for nouns and 0.52 for verbs. We also analyse the variability of responses highlighting the influence of bi-/multilingualism on (picture) naming. The picture corpus is freely accessible to researchers and clinicians. It may be used for future standardization with other languages of similar cultural contexts, and relevant items can be used in languages from different cultures, following suitable standardization.

Valence without meaning: Investigating form and semantic components in pseudowords valence

Valence is a dominant semantic dimension, and it is fundamentally linked to basic approach-avoidance behavior within a broad range of contexts. Previous studies have shown that it is possible to approximate the valence of existing words based on several surface-level and semantic components of the stimuli. Parallelly, recent studies have shown that even completely novel and (apparently) meaningless stimuli, like pseudowords, can be informative of meaning based on the information that they carry at the subword level. Here, we aimed to further extend this evidence by investigating whether humans can reliably assign valence to pseudowords and, additionally, to identify the factors explaining such valence judgments. In Experiment 1, we trained several models to predict valence judgments for existing words from their combined form and meaning information. Then, in Experiment 2 and Experiment 3, we extended the results by predicting participants' valence judgments for pseudowords, using a set of models indexing different (possible) sources of valence and selected the best performing model in a completely data-driven procedure. Results showed that the model including basic surface-level (i.e., letters composing the pseudoword) and orthographic neighbors information performed best, thus tracing back pseudoword valence to these components. These findings support perspectives on the nonarbitrariness of language and provide insights regarding how humans process the valence of novel stimuli.

Speech production and perception data collection in R: A tutorial for web-based methods using speechcollectr

This tutorial is designed for speech scientists familiar with the R programming language who wish to construct experiment interfaces in R. We begin by discussing some of the benefits of building experiment interfaces in R-including R's existing tools for speech data analysis, platform independence, suitability for web-based testing, and the fact that R is open source. We explain basic concepts of reactive programming in R, and we apply these principles by detailing the development of two sample experiments. The first of these experiments comprises a speech production task in which participants are asked to read words with different emotions. The second sample experiment involves a speech perception task, in which participants listen to recorded speech and identify the emotion the talker expressed with forced-choice questions and confidence ratings. Throughout this tutorial, we introduce the new R package speechcollectr, which provides functions uniquely suited to web-based speech data collection. The package streamlines the code required for speech experiments by providing functions for common tasks like documenting participant consent, collecting participant demographic information, recording audio, checking the adequacy of a participant's microphone or headphones, and presenting audio stimuli. Finally, we describe some of the difficulties of remote speech data collection, along with the solutions we have incorporated into speechcollectr to meet these challenges.

Effects of emotional ambiguity and emotional intensity on true and false memory

Whereas the effects of emotional intensity (the perceived strength of an item's valence or arousal) have long been studied in true- and false-memory research, emotional ambiguity (the uncertainty that attaches to perceived emotional intensity) has only been studied recently. Available evidence suggests that emotional ambiguity has reliable effects on true memory that are distinct from those of emotional intensity. However, those findings are mostly restricted to recall, and the effects of emotional ambiguity on false memory remain unexplored. The current study addressed both limitations by measuring the effects of emotional ambiguity and emotional intensity on true and false recognition. In two experiments, we manipulated valence ambiguity and valence intensity (Experiment 1) and arousal ambiguity and arousal intensity (Experiment 2) of Deese/Roediger/McDermott lists. Multiple linear regression analyses were conducted for Experiment 1, Experiment 2, and the combined data of the experiments to separate the effects of emotional ambiguity and emotional intensity. Our results showed that both valence ambiguity and arousal ambiguity improved true recognition, and the effects of valence ambiguity remained robust even when controlling for valence intensity, arousal intensity, and arousal ambiguity. More importantly, for both valence and arousal, there was an interaction between ambiguity and intensity in false memory. Specifically, we found that valence ambiguity increased false recognition with positive valence, while arousal ambiguity amplified the effect of arousal intensity on false recognition. Our results are discussed in the context of the emotional ambiguity hypothesis and fuzzy-trace theory.

Using Freely Generated Labels Instead of Rating Scales to Assess Emotion in Everyday Life

To measure emotion in daily life, studies often prompt participants to repeatedly rate their feelings on a set of prespecified terms. This approach has yielded key findings in the psychological literature yet may not represent how people typically describe their experiences. We used an alternative approach, in which participants labeled their current emotion with at least one word of their choosing. In an initial study, estimates of label positivity recapitulated momentary valence ratings and were associated with self-reported mental health. The number of unique emotion words used over time was related to the balance and spread of emotions endorsed in an end-of-day rating task, but not to other measures of emotional functioning. A second study tested and replicated a subset of these findings. Considering the variety and richness of participant responses, a free-label approach appears to be a viable as well as compelling means of studying emotion in everyday life.

How does emotional content influence visual word recognition? A meta-analysis of valence effects

Research on the interplay between language and emotion has shown evidence that the affective content of words influences their recognition. However, the direction of the effects is not clear, as there are mixed findings regarding the role of positive and, especially, negative valence. We conducted a Bayesian multi-level meta-analysis to examine the role of valence in visual word recognition, focusing on the lexical decision task. The results revealed a facilitative effect of positive valence on lexical decision times. That is, positive words led to faster responses than both negative and neutral words. In contrast, negative valence did not have any effect, although the analysis of several moderator variables suggested that there might be a facilitative effect in some cases, specifically, when negative words elicit very strong and intense emotions. These results shed light on the complexities of emotional word processing. They also point to the need for psycholinguistic models to take affective information into account, and thus provide a complete view of visual word recognition.

Effectiveness of production and drawing as encoding techniques on recall using mixed- and pure-list designs

We compared the benefit of production and drawing on recall of concrete and abstract words, using mixed- and pure-list designs. We varied stimulus and list types to examine whether the memory benefit from these strategies was sustained across these manipulations. For all experiments, the memory retrieval task was free recall. In Experiment 1, participants studied concrete and abstract words sequentially, with prompts to either silently-read, read aloud, write, or draw each target (intermixed). Reading aloud, writing, and drawing improved recall compared to silent reading, with drawing leading to the largest boost. Performance, however, was at floor in all but the drawing condition. In Experiment 2, the number of targets was reduced, and each strategy (between-subjects) was compared to silent-reading. We eliminated floor effects and replicated results from Experiment 1. In Experiment 3, we manipulated strategy in a pure-list-design. The drawing benefit was maintained while that from production was eliminated. In all experiments, recall was higher for concrete than abstract words that were drawn; no such effect was found for words produced. Results suggest that drawing facilitates memory by enhancing semantic elaboration, whereas the production benefit is largely perceptually based. Importantly, the memory benefit conferred by drawing at encoding, unlike production, cannot be explained by a distinctiveness account as it was relatively unaffected by study design.

Evolution of the Moral Lexicon

Morality is central to social well-being and cognition, and moral lexicon is a key device for human communication of moral concepts and experiences. How was the moral lexicon formed? We explore this open question and hypothesize that words evolved to take on abstract moral meanings from concrete and grounded experiences. We test this hypothesis by analyzing semantic change and formation of over 800 words from the English Moral Foundations Dictionary and the Historical Thesaurus of English over the past hundreds of years. Across historical text corpora and dictionaries, we discover concrete-to-abstract shifts as words acquire moral meaning, in contrast with the broad observation that words become more concrete over time. Furthermore, we find that compound moral words tend to be derived from a concrete-to-abstract shift from their constituents, and this derivational property is more prominent in moral words compared to alternative compound words when word frequency is controlled for. We suggest that evolution of the moral lexicon depends on systematic metaphorical mappings from concrete domains to the moral domain. Our results provide large-scale evidence for the role of metaphor in shaping the historical development of the English moral lexicon.

PHONETIC UNDERPINNINGS OF SOUND SYMBOLISM ACROSS MULTIPLE DOMAINS OF MEANING

Sound symbolism occurs when the sound of a word alone can convey its meaning, e.g. 'balloon' and 'spike' sound rounded and pointed, respectively. Sound-symbolic correspondences are widespread in natural languages, but it is unclear how they are instantiated across different domains of meaning. Here, participants rated auditory pseudowords on opposing scales of seven different sound-symbolic domains: shape (rounded-pointed), texture (hard-soft), weight (light-heavy), size (small-big), brightness (bright-dark), arousal (calming-exciting), and valence (good-bad). Ratings showed cross-domain relationships, some mirroring those between corresponding physical domains, e.g. size and weight ratings were associated, reflecting a physical size-weight relationship, while others involved metaphorical mappings, e.g., bright/dark mapped onto good/bad, respectively. The phonetic features of the pseudowords formed unique sets with characteristic feature weightings for each domain and tended to follow the cross-domain ratings relationships. These results suggest that sound-symbolic correspondences rely on domain-specific patterns of phonetic features, with cross-domain correspondences reflecting physical or metaphorical relationships.

The good, the bad, and the ambivalent: Extrapolating affective values for 38,000+ Chinese words via a computational model

Word affective ratings are important tools in psycholinguistic research, natural language processing, and many other fields. However, even for well-studied languages, such norms are usually limited in scale. To extrapolate affective (i.e., valence and arousal) values for words in the SUBTLEX-CH database (Cai & Brysbaert, 2010, PLoS ONE, 5(6):e10729), we implemented a computational neural network which captured how words' vector-based semantic representations corresponded to the probability densities of their valence and arousal. Based on these probability density functions, we predicted not only a word's affective values, but also their respective degrees of variability that could characterize individual differences in human affective ratings. The resulting estimates of affective values largely converged with human ratings for both valence and arousal, and the estimated degrees of variability also captured important features of the variability in human ratings. We released the extrapolated affective values, together with their corresponding degrees of variability, for over 38,000 Chinese words in the Open Science Framework ( https://osf.io/s9zmd/ ). We also discussed how the view of embodied cognition could be illuminated by this computational model.

Digital language markers distinguish frontal from right anterior temporal lobe atrophy in frontotemporal dementia

Background and Objectives

Within frontotemporal dementia (FTD), the behavioral variant (bvFTD) characterized by frontal atrophy, and semantic behavioral variant (sbvFTD) characterized by right anterior temporal lobe (rATL) atrophy, present diagnostic challenges due to overlapping symptoms and neuroanatomy. Accurate differentiation is crucial for clinical trial inclusion targeting TDP-43 proteinopathies. This study investigated whether automated speech analysis can distinguish between FTD-related rATL and frontal atrophy, potentially offering a non-invasive diagnostic tool.

Methods

In a cross-sectional design, we included 40 participants with FTD-related predominant frontal atrophy (n=16) or predominant rATL atrophy (n=24) and 22 healthy controls from the UCSF Memory and Aging Center. Using stepwise logistic regression and receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve analysis, we analyzed 16 linguistic and acoustic features that were extracted automatically from audio-recorded picture description tasks. Neuroimaging data were analyzed using voxel-based morphometry to examine brain-behavior relationships of regional atrophy with the features selected in the regression models.

Results

Logistic regression identified three features (content units, lexical frequency, familiarity) differentiating the overall FTD group from controls (AUC=.973), adjusted for age. Within the FTD group, five features (adpositions/total words ratio, arousal, syllable pause duration, restarts, words containing 'thing') differentiated frontal from rATL atrophy (AUC=.943). Neuroimaging analyses showed that semantic features (lexical frequency, content units, 'thing' words) were linked to bilateral inferior temporal lobe structures, speech and lexical features (syllable pause duration, adpositions/total words ratio) to bilateral inferior frontal gyri, and socio-emotional features (arousal) to areas known to mediate social cognition including the right insula and bilateral anterior temporal structures. As a composite score, this set of five features was uniquely associated with rATL atrophy.

Discussion

Automated speech analysis effectively distinguished the overall FTD group from controls and differentiated between frontal and rATL atrophy. The neuroimaging findings for individual features highlight the neural basis of language impairments in these FTD variants, and when considered together, underscore the importance of utilizing features' combined power to identify impaired language patterns. Automated speech analysis could enhance early diagnosis and monitoring of FTD, offering a scalable, non-invasive alternative to traditional methods, particularly in resource-limited settings. Further research should aim to integrate automated speech analysis into multi-modal diagnostic frameworks.

Norms for 718 Persian Words in Emotional Dimensions, Animacy, and Familiarity

Research frequently uses words as stimuli to assess cognitive and psychological processes. However, various attributes of these words, such as their semantic and emotional aspects, could potentially confound study results if not properly controlled. This study aims to establish a reliable foundation for the semantic and emotional aspects of words for research in Persian. To this end, the present study provided norms for 718 Persian nouns in arousal, valence, familiarity, and animacy dimensions. The words were selected from a previous English dataset (Warriner et al. in Behav Res Methods 45(4):1191-1207, 2013), translated into Persian, and rated by a total of 463 native Persian-speaking participants. The ratings were obtained through an online questionnaire using a 9-point Likert scale for emotional dimensions (i.e., valence and arousal) and a 5-point Likert scale for semantic dimensions (i.e., familiarity and animacy). The reliability of the ratings was measured using the split-half method, and the result indicated a high consistency of ratings in all dimensions. To assess the relationship between the emotional and semantic dimensions, Pearson correlation coefficient was conducted. Gender differences were investigated through the Mann-Whitney U test, and significant differences were observed in all dimensions. These results are compared with findings from previous studies that were conducted in various languages.

Ethics-testing an eating disorder recovery memoir: a pre-publication experiment

BACKGROUND

Narratives (including memoirs and novels) about eating disorders (EDs) are typically published with the intention to benefit readers, but survey evidence suggests that reading such narratives with an active ED may more often be harmful than helpful. To reduce the probability of inadvertent harm and learn more about how narrative reading and EDs interact, a pre-publication study was designed to determine whether or not a recovery memoir should be published.

METHODS

64 participants with a self-reported ED read either the experimental text (The Hungry Anorexic [HA]) or a control text (Ten Zen Questions [TZ]) over a roughly two-week period. All participants completed the Eating Disorder Examination Questionnaire (EDE-Q) and the Anorexia Nervosa Stages of Change Questionnaire (ANSOCQ) one week before and two weeks after reading, and answered three recurring open-ended questions at regular timepoints during and after the reading. Computational analysis of the free-text responses assessed text/response similarity and response characteristics on emotional, sensory, and action-effector dimensions. Both rating-scale and free-text data were analysed using mixed ANOVAs to test for effects of time and condition, and the university ethics board was notified in advance of the quantitative threshold for harmful effects that would prohibit the ED memoir from being published.

RESULTS

On the two quantitative measures, there was an effect of time but not of condition: Significant improvement was found in both groups on the EDE-Q (with a medium-to-large effect size) and the ANSOCQ (with a very large effect size). In an ANCOVA analysis, no significant mediating effects were found for age, education, duration of professional support for the ED, or pre/post-reading BMI change. For the free-text responses, linguistic similarity measures indicated that HA responses most closely matched the text of HA, with the same being true for TZ. In a word-norm analysis, text condition significantly affected six emotional, sensory, and action-effector variables (interoception, olfaction, gustatory, mouth, torso, and hand/arm), mean scores for all of which were higher in HA responses than TZ responses. Close reading of readers' responses explored two potential mechanisms for the positive effects of time but not condition: engagement with the during-reading prompts as part of the experimental setup and engagement with the texts' dialogical form.

CONCLUSIONS

The ED memoir was found not to yield measurably harmful effects for readers with an ED, and will therefore be published. The finding that significant improvement on both quantitative measures was observed irrespective of text condition suggests that positive effects may be attributable to linguistic characteristics shared by the two texts or to elements of the reading and/or reflective processes scaffolded by both. The quantitative results and the free-text testimony have implications for our understanding of bibliotherapy, "triggering", and the practicalities of responsible publishing.

ANCW: Affective norms for 4030 Chinese words

Affective information contained in words is gaining increased attention among neurolinguists and psycholinguists around the world. This study established the Affective Norms for Chinese Words (ANCW) with valence, arousal, dominance, and concreteness ratings for 4030 words that were Chinese adaptations of the CET-4 (The National College English Test Band 4) official syllabus. Despite the existing Chinese affective norms such as the Chinese Affective Words System (CAWS), the ANCW provides much more and richer Chinese vocabulary. By using 7-point (ranging from 1 to 7) Likert scales in a paper-and-pencil procedure, we obtained ratings for all variables from 3717 Chinese undergraduates. The ANCW norms possessed good response reliability and were compatible with prior normative studies in Chinese. The pairwise correlation analysis revealed quadratic relations between valence and arousal, arousal and dominance, as well as valence and concreteness. Additionally, valence and dominance, as well as arousal and concreteness, presented a linear correlation, and concreteness and dominance were correlated. The ANCW provides reliable and standardized stimulus materials for further research involving emotional language processing.

Valence and concreteness in item recognition: Evidence against the affective embodiment account

The Affective Embodiment Account posits that sensorimotor interactions play an important role in learning and processing concrete words whereas experiences from emotional states play an important role in learning and processing abstract words. Because of this, there should be greater enhancement of valence for abstract than for concrete words and therefore there should be an interaction between valence and concreteness. Although this prediction has been observed in a number of tasks, very few studies have looked specifically at memory. Three experiments are reported that assess whether valence interacts with concreteness in recognition. In Experiment 1, recognition of concrete words was better than abstract, but there was no difference as a function of whether the words were positive or negative and there was no interaction. Experiment 2 compared positive and neutral words and Experiment 3 compared negative and neutral words; in both, there was a concreteness effect but no effect of valence and no interaction. These results replicate previous findings that when positive and negative words are equated more fully, valence has no effect on recognition, and also suggest a limit on the scope of the Affective Embodiment Account.

The bright side of words: Norms for 9000 Spanish words in seven discrete positive emotions

In recent years, assumptions about the existence of a single construct of happiness that accounts for all positive emotions have been questioned. Instead, several discrete positive emotions with their own neurobiological and psychological mechanisms have been proposed. Of note, the effects of positive emotions on language processing are not yet properly understood. Here we provide a database for a large set of 9000 Spanish words scored by 3437 participants in the positive emotions of awe, contentment, amusement, excitement, serenity, relief, and pleasure. We also report significant correlations between discrete positive emotions and several affective (e.g., valence, arousal, happiness, negative discrete emotions) and lexico-semantic (e.g., frequency of use, familiarity, concreteness, age of acquisition) characteristics of words. Finally, we analyze differences between words conveying a single emotion ("pure" emotion words) and those denoting more than one emotion ("mixed" emotion words). This study will provide researchers a rich source of information to do research that contributes to expanding the current knowledge on the role of positive emotions in language. The norms are available at https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.21533571.v2.

Extrapolation of affective norms using transformer-based neural networks and its application to experimental stimuli selection

Data on the emotionality of words is important for the selection of experimental stimuli and sentiment analysis on large bodies of text. While norms for valence and arousal have been thoroughly collected in English, most languages do not have access to such large datasets. Moreover, theoretical developments lead to new dimensions being proposed, the norms for which are only partially available. In this paper, we propose a transformer-based neural network architecture for semantic and emotional norms extrapolation that predicts a whole ensemble of norms at once while achieving state-of-the-art correlations with human judgements on each. We improve on the previous approaches with regards to the correlations with human judgments by Δr = 0.1 on average. We precisely discuss the limitations of norm extrapolation as a whole, with a special focus on the introduced model. Further, we propose a unique practical application of our model by proposing a method of stimuli selection which performs unsupervised control by picking words that match in their semantic content. As the proposed model can easily be applied to different languages, we provide norm extrapolations for English, Polish, Dutch, German, French, and Spanish. To aid researchers, we also provide access to the extrapolation networks through an accessible web application.

Ratings of valence, arousal, happiness, anger, fear, sadness, disgust, and surprise for 24,000 Dutch words

Emotion is a fundamental aspect of human life and therefore is critically encoded in language. To facilitate research into the encoding of emotion in language and how emotion associations affect language processing, we present a new set of emotion norms for over 24,000 Dutch words. The emotion norms include ratings of two key dimensions of emotion: valence and arousal, as well as ratings on discrete emotion categories: happiness, anger, fear, sadness, disgust, and surprise. We show that emotional information can predict word processing, such that responses to positive words are facilitated in contrast to neutral and negative words. We also demonstrate how the ratings of emotion are related to personality characteristics. The data are available via the Open Science Framework ( https://osf.io/9htuv/ ) and serve as a valuable resource for research into emotion as well as in applied settings such as healthcare and digital communication.

The impact of emotional valence on generalization gradients

Generalization enables individuals to respond to novel stimuli based on previous experiences. The degree to which organisms respond is determined by their physical resemblance to the original conditioned stimulus (CS+), with a stronger response elicited by more similar stimuli, resulting in similarity-based generalization gradients. Recent research showed that cognitive or conceptual dimensions also result in gradients similar to those observed with manipulations of physical dimensions. Such findings suggest that attributes beyond physical similarity play a role in shaping generalization gradients. However, despite its adaptive relevance for survival, there is no study exploring the effectiveness of affective dimensions in shaping generalization gradients. In two experiments (135 Spanish and 150 English participants, respectively), we used an online predictive learning task, in which different stimuli (words and Gabor patches) were paired with the presence - or absence - of a fictitious shock. After training, we assessed whether valence (i.e., hedonic experience) conveyed by words shape generalization gradients. In Experiment 1, the outcome expectancy decreased monotonically with variations in valence of Spanish words, mirroring the gradient obtained with the physical dimension (line orientation). In Experiment 2, conducted with English words, a similar gradient was observed when non-trained (i.e., generalization) words varied along the valence dimension, but not when words were of neutral valence. The consistency of these findings across two different languages strengthens the reliability and validity of the affective dimension as a determinant of generalization gradients. Furthermore, our data highlight the importance of considering the role of affective features in generalization responses, advancing the interplay between emotion, language, and learning.

Untangling the threads of motivated memory: Independent influences of reward and emotion

Motivational and emotional influences on memory have been studied extensively; however, despite the link between these constructs, they have been studied in separate lines of research, with very little work examining their effects concurrently. The current study takes a novel approach to manipulate motivational and emotional influences orthogonally, and within the same task, to test their interplay on intentional memory formation. If emotion and reward motivation are tightly linked, they may rely on overlapping cognitive mechanisms, thus we would not expect emotion and reward to interact in memory. Alternatively, they could be distinct constructs and therefore would boost memory when both are included in the same experimental trial, above and beyond additive effects. To test these competing predictions, in Experiment 1, participants (n = 180) completed an old/new recognition memory task with emotional (negative, positive) and neutral words intentionally encoded with high or low reward anticipation cues. In Experiment 2, participants (n = 159) encoded emotional and neutral words with a high or low reward cue, but memory was tested with free recall using study-test blocks. The findings from both experiments converged. There were main effects of emotion and reward in generally hypothesized directions, but no evidence of an interaction between these factors. This is in line with the prediction that emotion and reward motivation are similar constructs. Their combination within a trial does not boost memory above and beyond either of these factors alone perhaps indicating these constructs have similar cognitive mechanisms.

The N400 effect captures nuances in implicit political preferences

We conducted a study in San Antonio, Texas, in the weeks preceding the 2022 state Governor election to determine if implicit or explicit measures of political preference could predict voter behavior. We adapted an established event-related potential (ERP) paradigm showing political statements to participants one word at the time where the last word made the statement pro-Republican or pro-Democratic. Our sample of college students included decided and undecided voters, and was reflective of the demographic make-up of south-central Texas. Our implicit measures were an established authoritarianism scale and the N400 effect to the sentence-final word. The N400 is an ERP to any stimulus that engages semantic memory and has been shown to measure implicit disagreement with political statements. Explicit measures of political preference and authoritarianism were predictive of vote choice. The expected N400 effect was found for Democratic voters, with larger amplitude to pro-Republican than pro-Democratic statements. Surprisingly, decided Republican voters showed no difference in N400 responses to pro-Republican and pro-Democratic statements and there was no group difference in the N400 effect. In turn, the N400 was not predictive of voter behavior. We argue that the N400 effect reflected individual political preferences, but that ultimately voter behavior aligned with partisan identity.

Syntactic and emotional interplay in second language: emotional resonance but not proficiency modulates affective influences on L2 syntactic processing

Previous research has demonstrated the influence of emotions during linguistic processing, indicating the interactivity of both processes in the brain. However, little is known regarding such interplay in a second language (L2). This study addressed this question by examining the reading effects of syntactic violations while processing L2 emotional and neutral statements. Forty-six Spanish-English bilinguals with various levels of L2 proficiency and emotional resonance (i.e. capability for emotional experience in L2) were presented with a self-paced sentence reading task. Sentences contained positive (16), neutral (16) and negative (16) verbs, half of them presented in agreement and half in disagreement with the preceding pronoun. Analysis of verb reading times using linear mixed effects modelling revealed a significant interaction between syntactic violation, verb valence and emotional resonance, suggesting that stronger emotional L2 experience results in a higher saliency of negative verbs, reducing the impact of syntactic violations.

Mapping semantic space: Exploring the higher-order structure of word meaning

Multiple representation theories posit that concepts are represented via a combination of properties derived from sensorimotor, affective, and linguistic experiences. Recently, it has been proposed that information derived from social experience, or socialness, represents another key aspect of conceptual representation. How these various dimensions interact to form a coherent conceptual space has yet to be fully explored. To address this, we capitalized on openly available word property norms for 6339 words and conducted a large-scale investigation into the relationships between 18 dimensions. An exploratory factor analysis reduced the dimensions to six higher-order factors: sub-lexical, distributional, visuotactile, body action, affective and social interaction. All these factors explained unique variance in performance on lexical and semantic tasks, demonstrating that they make important contributions to the representation of word meaning. An important and novel finding was that the socialness dimension clustered with the auditory modality and with mouth and head actions. We suggest this reflects experiential learning from verbal interpersonal interactions. Moreover, formally modelling the network structure of semantic space revealed pairwise partial correlations between most dimensions and highlighted the centrality of the interoception dimension. Altogether, these findings provide new insights into the architecture of conceptual space, including the importance of inner and social experience, and highlight promising avenues for future research.