Emotional intensity and categorisation ratings for emotional and nonemotional words

Research investigating emotion processing has benefited from standardised stimulus-sets portraying auditory and visual emotions. However, relatively few stimulus-sets have been developed for emotional words, despite the increasing popularity of studies comparing the cognitive processing of emotional and nonemotional words. Words included in studies of emotion often control for pleasantness, but do not control for other factors such as emotional intensity, word frequency, and word length. Finally, categorisation ratings of words into discrete emotional categories are conspicuously absent from the literature. The current study addresses these issues by developing emotional intensity and categorisation ratings for a set of 463 words. Participants included 200 undergraduate students between the ages 18–40. Participants rated words based upon emotional intensity, and categorised words into discrete emotional conditions for which they perceived a word as being most representative. Results indicated that many words were reliably classified into basic emotion categories.