Valence and Arousal Ratings for 420 Finnish Nouns by Age and Gender

Abstract

Language-and culture-specific norms are needed for research on emotion-laden stimuli. We present valence and arousal ratings for 420 Finnish nouns for a sample of 996 Finnish speakers. Ratings are provided both for the whole sample and for subgroups divided by age and gender in light of previous research suggesting age- and gender-specific reactivity to the emotional content in stimuli. Moreover, corpus-based frequency values and word length are provided as objective psycholinguistic measures of the nouns. The relationship between valence and arousal mainly showed the curvilinear relationship reported in previous studies. Age and gender effects on valence and arousal ratings were statistically significant but weak. The inherent affective properties of the words in terms of mean valence and arousal ratings explained more of the variance in the ratings. In all, the findings suggest that language- and culture-related factors influence the way affective properties of words are rated to a greater degree than demographic factors. This database will provide researchers with normative data for Finnish emotion-laden and emotionally neutral words. The normative database is available in Database S1. © 2013 Söderholm et al.