A Study Of The Affective Ratings Of L2 Words Based On Valence,Arousal,and Dominance

Emotion is the integration of physiological and psychological activity,with a multi-dimensional structure.In the study of emotion,the dimensional view has been widely adopted.Emotional stimuli usually have many forms,among which the physical attributes of lexical stimuli are easy to control and widely used.The evaluation of English affective norms follows Osgood’s view of dimensionality and holds that emotion consists of three dimensions: valence,arousal and dominance.Emotional experience is an internal and subjective feeling,so how to quantify it accurately and effectively is a fundamental issue to be solved.Most of the previous studies were based on the establishment of a normalized stimuli database for the native language,while few studies have been conducted on the establishment of emotional stimuli for a second language.Therefore,based on the emotional evaluation of English words,this thesis evaluated and verified the emotional information of 4,030 English words on three dimensions,and compiled the database of the affective words among Chinese EFL learners.Specifically,this thesis tries to answer the following two questions:(1)How are three emotional dimensions correlated in an emotional space?1)How are the two of three emotional dimensions distributed on the interface?2)How closely are the two of three emotional dimensions correlated?(2)Will linguistic asymmetry be found along three dimensions among Chinese EFL learners?To answer these questions,a paper-pencil test was made with 955 college students,who were asked to rate valence,arousal and dominance on a 11-point rating scale.Then a detailed analysis of the collected data was made by SPSS.The findings are as follows.First,there is a quadratic correlation between valence and arousal,a linear correlation between arousal and dominance,and a linear relation between dominance and valence.After making a further statistical analysis,there is a weakly U-shaped correlation between valence and arousal,a weakly positive correlation between arousal and dominance,and a strong positive correlation between dominance and valence,which is manifested as higher dominance in relation to higher valence.Secondly,linguistic asymmetry was found along three dimensions among Chinese EFL learners.In line with previous studies,the distribution of valence is negatively skewed,with more positive words found in the database,corroborating the existence of linguistic positive bias.The distribution of dominance is positively skewed,with more prevailing words found in the database.Different from prior studies,arousal was positively skewed in this study,with more high arousing words found in the database.The establishment of emotional stimuli database provides the experimental materials for the study of emotion of Chinese EFL learners,and is conducive to the comparison of emotional research results among different laboratories,which will contribute to a better understanding of emotion in different cultures.Meanwhile,there are a large number of English educators in China,the findings of which will provide valuable references for the improvement of English teaching.