| 其他摘要 | Emotional words are one of the most commonly used materials in research in cognitive psychology, emotion psychology, cognitive neuroscience, and other disciplines. The standardized compilation of emotional words is helpful for the study on sentiment analysis, such as emotion, vocabulary recognition, attention, memory and so on. A large number of studies based on Life span development or age difference have found that there are significant age differences in people's emotional perception and cognitive processing, especially among children, young and middle-aged people and the elderly. On this basis, age may be the main factor affecting the rating of emotional words. However, as far as we know, there is no study on the age difference in the perception and evaluation of the meaning of Chinese emotional words from children to the elderly. Based on this, two studies were designed to investigate for the first time the differences in the ratings of Chinese emotion words among children, young and middle-aged people and the elderly, and whether these age differences are related to self-relevance.
In Study 1，a total of 170 participants consisting of children (11一12 years old), young and middle-aged (19-53 years old), and the elderly (60-65 years old) were invited to rate 1,558 Chinese emotional words. The nine-point scales method was used to collect the ratings of valence, arousal, dominance, and familiarity from the three age groups. We compared this database with the existing Chinese emotional vocabulary to verify the reliability and validation of this database. The study found that there is a strong correlation between the various dimensions of emotional words. There is a U-shaped relationship between valence and arousal, that is, extremely pleasant and unpleasant words were rated higher in arousal. The relationship between valence and dominant as follows: The more pleasurable it is, the more dominant it is. Meanwhile, we found that age affect emotional words of different valences. For valence, children tended to rate positive words as more positive and negative words as more negative. For arousal, elderly tended to rate negative words as calmer, positive words were more exciting. For the dominance of words, the elder's valence ratings were the lowest in the three age groups. This indicated that the elderly perceived little control over various words.
Prior studies indicate that self-relevance may influence the ratings. However there is a big difference in individual rating for self-relevance of words, and there is a lack of evidence. Given the differences in word perception among different age groups identified in this study, a worthwhile question is whether the valence ratings of words affect subsequent self-relevance ratings? To explore the above questions, In Study 2, a total of 70 young, middle-aged and elderly people were invited to participate in the self-relevance rating of emotional words. The results found that valence and self-relevance were highly positively correlated. People rated positive words to be more relevant to themselves. The dominance of words was also positively correlated with self-relevance. People tend to think that words with dominance are highly correlated with self, and they have a great sense of control. On the dimension of arousal, there were different results for the young and the elderly，self-relevance was significantly negatively correlated in young age groups, the higher the arousal ratings, the less it has to do with oneself. For the elderly, those words which were rated to be high self-relevance will have a higher-level rating of physiological arousal. The results can be explained by Life span Theory and Socioemotional Selectivity Theory. As people grow older, they perceive that time is limited in the future, and information related to the self is more included in emotional processing, while information not related to the self is excluded.
To sum up, we found significant differences in the valence, arousal, dominance, familiarity, self-relevance ratings of word in different age groups through our database, these age differences were significantly associated with self-relevance. The quantitative standard of emotional words based on age differences provided in this study will provide standardized experimental materials and research references for the research fields of cognitive neuroscience, gerontology and social psychology of Chinese emotion words, and the emotional words with labeled information obtained in this study will also provide valuable corpus resources for emotion analysis in natural language processing. |
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