中華心理衛生協會

Purpose: This study reports the emotional ratings of 267 common Chinese words and the free associations of these words by 283 participants. The mean ratings of arousal level, familiarity, concreteness, number of associative links, and the associative strength are also included. Methods: For each word, one-half of the participants were asked to rate the word's emotional valence and familiarity, while the other half were asked to rate the word's arousal level and concreteness. Upon receiving each target word, all participants were also asked to report the first associated word that came to mind. Results: Analyses comparing words with different levels of emotional valence showed that the negative words had a higher level of concreteness rating than the positive and neutral words. The positive words were rated as more familiar than the other two types of words. Conclusions: This study provides useful norms for experiments investigating effects of emotional words on various aspects of cognitive processes. In particular, it provides a valuable database of emotional words that can be matched in various ways while other lexical characteristics are manipulated.