Emotionality of Turkish language and primary adaptation of affective English norms for Turkish

Official URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s12144-018-0119-x

Emotional load assessment of the written words has gained considerable interest in psycholinguistics, semantics, and analysis of psychophysiological and electrophysiological correlates of emotional processing. Considering the lack of a publicly available database with affective ratings of contemporary verbal stimuli obtained from native Turkish speakers, we present the affective norms for two datasets of Turkish words carefully adapted from the Affective Norms for English Words (ANEW) database. The valence and arousal ratings are obtained from 61 college-aged participants for 127 highly arousing, emotionally-loaded words in the Adapted Turkish Affective List (ATAL). The ATAL ratings show a tendency of classifying fewer words as positive compared to the original list of stimuli, significantly higher arousal levels for positively rated Turkish stimuli compared to the negative and neutral words, and more congruence in arousal levels of positively exciting words. For the medium to high arousing 508 words in the Expanded Turkish Affective List (ETAL) that cover the whole 9-point spectrum of the valence dimension, 136 Turkish respondents from a wider age, education, and occupation background show higher excitability towards highly unpleasant words. Strong cross-linguistic correlations of +0.968 between the valence ratings of ANEW and ATAL and +0.878 for ANEW and ETAL demonstrate the ease of transferring and perceiving the valence levels across English and Turkish. The medium correlation of roughly +0.450 between the English and Turkish arousal ratings account for lower excitation levels perceived by the native Turkish speakers and indicate the arousal dimension is similar to familiarity and originality in exhibiting more variations between different cultures. These findings demonstrate that this expanded database of partial affective normative ratings can be used as the ground truth for emotional and neurocognitive assessments, and that the presented methodology can be utilized for developing a comprehensive Turkish affective lexicon. The utilized word selection criteria also enable a cross-cultural analysis of adapted words in Turkish and other languages. Detailed normative ratings of this Turkish adaptation are included in the supplementary materials.