The Nencki Affective Picture System (NAPS): a Children-Rated Subset

Abstract

Emotion research in children should make use of emotional stimuli ideally coming from children-rated databases. However, most of the works in this area use adult-rated stimuli databases or a collection of stimuli taken from the Internet or from unidentified sources without any standardization procedure or content control for children population. These issues result in an overall lack of control over the kind of emotion to be elicited, leading to limited results. Therefore, in this work, a children-rated picture subset taken from the adult-rated Nencki Affective Picture System (NAPS) set is proposed as a stimuli database for emotion research in children. The NAPS is a standardized set of 1356 realistic, high-quality photographs classified into five categories (people, faces, animals, objects, and landscapes), and up to now, normative ratings were only collected in an adult population. The proposed subset in this work contains 1128 pictures taken from the original database which are developmentally appropriate for children based on different criteria and an expert’s judgment procedure. Affective ratings were collected from a sample of 266 children 8–12 years old. With this work, both the availability and quality of affective stimuli for the study of emotion in children are directly improved.