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 mea...

The influence of affect and attention on sensory and affective pain as well as on somatosensory evoked potentials in response to painful and nonpainful electrical stimuli was investigated in a single experimental design. Affect was induced by pictures from the International Affective Picture System; attention was manipulated by asking participants to focus attention either on the pictures or on...

Compared to the categorical approach that represents affective states as several discrete classes (e.g., positive and negative), the dimensional approach represents affective states as continuous numerical values on multiple dimensions, such as the valence-arousal (VA) space, thus allowing for more fine-grained sentiment analysis. In building dimensional sentiment applications, affective lexico...

In the last decades, food pictures have been repeatedly employed to investigate the emotional impact of food on healthy participants as well as individuals who suffer from eating disorders and obesity. However, despite their widespread use, food pictures are typically selected according to each researcher's personal criteria, which make it difficult to reliably select food images and to compare...

The Montreal Affective Voices (MAVs) consist of a database of non-verbal affect bursts portrayed by Canadian actors, and high recognitions accuracies were observed in Canadian listeners. Whether listeners from other cultures would be as accurate is unclear. We tested for cross-cultural differences in perception of the MAVs: Japanese listeners were asked to rate the MAVs on several affective dim...

The present study investigated whether another individual's gaze direction influences an observer's affective responses. In Experiment 1, subjective self-ratings and an affective priming paradigm were employed to examine how participants explicitly and implicitly, respectively, evaluated the affective valence of direct gaze, averted gaze, and closed eyes. The explicit self-ratings showed that p...

BACKGROUND The study of emotional speech perception and emotional prosody necessitates stimuli with reliable affective norms. However, ratings may be affected by the participants' current emotional state as increased anxiety and depression have been shown to yield altered neural responding to emotional stimuli. Therefore, the present study had two aims, first to provide a database of emotional ...