The Madrid Affective Database for Spanish (MADS): Ratings of Dominance, Familiarity, Subjective Age of Acquisition and Sensory Experience

PLoS One. 2016 May 26;11(5):e0155866. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0155866. eCollection 2016.

Abstract

The current study presents ratings by 540 Spanish native speakers for dominance, familiarity, subjective age of acquisition (AoA), and sensory experience (SER) for the 875 Spanish words included in the Madrid Affective Database for Spanish (MADS). The norms can be downloaded as supplementary materials for this manuscript from https://figshare.com/s/8e7b445b729527262c88 These ratings may be of potential relevance to researches who are interested in characterizing the interplay between language and emotion. Additionally, with the aim of investigating how the affective features interact with the lexicosemantic properties of words, we performed correlational analyses between norms for familiarity, subjective AoA and SER, and scores for those affective variables which are currently included in the MADs. A distinct pattern of significant correlations with affective features was found for different lexicosemantic variables. These results show that familiarity, subjective AoA and SERs may have independent effects on the processing of emotional words. They also suggest that these psycholinguistic variables should be fully considered when formulating theoretical approaches to the processing of affective language.

MeSH terms

  • Adult
  • Age Factors
  • Databases, Factual*
  • Female
  • Humans
  • Language*
  • Male
  • Psycholinguistics / methods*
  • Recognition, Psychology*
  • Semantics*
  • Spain
  • Vocabulary*
  • Young Adult

Grants and funding

This study was supported by grant PSI2012-37535 from the Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad (MINECO) of Spain to JAH, URL: www.mineco.gob.es; grant 2012V/PUNED/0009 from the UNED to PRM, URL: www.uned.es; grant I2M2: P2010/BMD-2349 to MAP, URL: www.madrid.org; Pre-doctoral grant from the Universidad Complutense of Madrid to MVRF, URL: www.ucm.es.