Affective Norms for Italian Words in Older Adults: Age Differences in Ratings of Valence, Arousal and Dominance

RESEARCH ARTICLE Affective Norms for Italian Words in Older Adults: Age Differences in Ratings of Valence, Arousal and Dominance Beth Fairfield1, Ettore Ambrosini2, Nicola Mammarella1, Maria Montefinese2* 1 Department of Psychological, Health and Territorial Sciences, University “G. d’Annunzio”, Chieti, Italy, 2 Department of Neuroscience, University of Padua, Padua, Italy * a1111111111 a1111111111 a1111111111 a1111111111 a1111111111 OPEN ACCESS Citation: Fairfield B, Ambrosini E, Mammarella N, Montefinese M (2017) Affective Norms for Italian Words in Older Adults: Age Differences in Ratings of Valence, Arousal and Dominance. PLoS ONE 12 (1): e0169472. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0169472 Editor: Christos Papadelis, Boston Children’s Hospital / Harvard Medical School, UNITED STATES Received: September 7, 2016 Accepted: December 17, 2016 Published: January 3, 2017 Copyright: © 2017 Fairfield et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Abstract In line with the dimensional theory of emotional space, we developed affective norms for words rated in terms of valence, arousal and dominance in a group of older adults to complete the adaptation of the Affective Norms for English Words (ANEW) for Italian and to aid research on aging. Here, as in the original Italian ANEW database, participants evaluated valence, arousal, and dominance by means of the Self-Assessment Manikin (SAM) in a paper-and-pencil procedure. We observed high split-half reliabilities within the older sample and high correlations with the affective ratings of previous research, especially for valence, suggesting that there is large agreement among older adults within and across-languages. More importantly, we found high correlations between younger and older adults, showing that our data are generalizable across different ages. However, despite this across-ages accord, we obtained age-related differences on three affective dimensions for a great number of words. In particular, older adults rated as more arousing and more unpleasant a number of words that younger adults rated as moderately unpleasant and arousing in our previous affective norms. Moreover, older participants rated negative stimuli as more arousing and positive stimuli as less arousing than younger participants, thus leading to a lesscurved distribution of ratings in the valence by arousal space. We also found more extreme ratings for older adults for the relationship between dominance and arousal: older adults gave lower dominance and higher arousal ratings for words rated by younger adults with middle dominance and arousal values. Together, these results suggest that our affective norms are reliable and can be confidently used to select words matched for the affective dimensions of valence, arousal and dominance across younger and older participants for future research in aging. Data Availability Statement: All relevant data are within the paper and its Supporting Information files. Funding: The authors received no specific funding for this work. Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist. Introduction Emotionally laden words influence a number of cognitive processes, such as lexical decision [1–4], reading [5,6] and memory [7,8]. More importantly, the affective appraisal of words varies from one culture to another [9], as well as between languages [10]. As a consequence, PLOS ONE | DOI:10.1371/journal.pone.0169472 January 3, 2017 1 / 22 Italian ANEW in Older Adults researchers have spent much effort in developing affective norms for words in a great number of languages, such as Italian [11], English [12–14], German [15–18], French [19,20], Finnish [21], Portuguese [22], Dutch [23], Brazilian [24], Spanish [25,26] and Chinese [27], in order to specifically characterize the affective content of words for each language. In this vein, it is not surprising that in the last year alone a host of affective norms for verbal stimuli have become available [27–36]. As posited by the dimensional theory of emotion [37], the affective connotation of words can be described along a number of different dimensions. This view is based on the seminal study of Osgood [37], who applied factor analyses to a wide variety of verbal differential judgments. In general, this analysis showed that two main factors, valence and arousal, explained the major portion of variance in affective meaning, suggesting that individuals approach pleasant or positive stimuli and avoid unpleasant or negative ones with variable degrees of intensity. A third dimension, called dominance or control, although significant, explained a smaller amount of variance. The term valence indicates the way an individual judges a stimulus (unpleasant vs. pleasant), the term arousal indicates the degree of activation an individual feels towards a stimulus (calm vs. exciting), whereas the term dominance/control indicates the degree of control an individual feels over a given stimulus (out of control vs. in control). In spite of the large effort made to collect language-specific affective norms for words, little effort has been given to developing age-specific affective norms [20,38–40]. The lack of affective norms in older participants has obliged researchers to study the impact of age on emotion, by adopting stimuli derived from norms on younger adults or collecting affective ratings on older adults a posteriori. Indeed, standardized ratings in an older population are fundamental for selecting stimuli in an initial phase of any experimental study (see [41]). Moreover, recently the effects of aging and affective information processing has generated considerable interest in researchers especially since older adults seem to have preserved functioning in emotion processing compared to younger adults [41]. In fact, studies concerning memory [42,43], attention [44], and decision-making [45] have repeatedly shown how older adults regulate their cognitive resources towards positive emotional information more than negative information in order to maximize positive affect and minimize negative affect compared to younger adults [46]. Moreover, this effect has been observed for different affective stimuli, including words [47], pictures [42], and faces [44]. More importantly, this growing amount of literature also highlights how older adults experience affective content differently than younger adults. In particular, a study by Kensinger and colleagues [48] found an agerelated interaction between perceived affective content in words and word recall from memory when participants’ own affective ratings were used whereas no significant interaction between age and valence in memory performance was found when younger adults’ ANEW ratings were used. The reversed pattern was observe (...truncated)