OBJECTIVE To explore the possible differences in subjective analysis of the emotional stimuli from the International Affective Picture System between elderly and young samples. METHOD 187 elderly subjects ranked the International Affective Picture System images according to the directions from the Manual of Affective Ratings. Their scores were compared to those obtained from International Aff...

The current study presents ratings by 540 Spanish native speakers for dominance, familiarity, subjective age of acquisition (AoA), and sensory experience (SER) for the 875 Spanish words included in the Madrid Affective Database for Spanish (MADS). The norms can be downloaded as supplementary materials for this manuscript from https://figshare.com/s/8e7b445b729527262c88 These ratings may be of p...

Affect modulates the blink startle reflex in the picture-viewing paradigm, however, the process responsible for reflex modulation during conditional stimuli (CSs) that have acquired valence through affective conditioning remains unclear. In Experiment 1, neutral shapes (CSs) and valenced or neutral pictures (USs) were paired in a forward (CS-->US) manner. Pleasantness ratings supported affectiv...

BACKGROUND Human affective responses appear to be regulated by limbic and paralimbic circuits. However, much less is known about the neurochemical systems engaged in this regulation. The mu-opioid neurotransmitter system is distributed in, and thought to regulate the function of, brain regions centrally implicated in affective processing. OBJECTIVE To examine the involvement of mu-opioid neur...

Asking people to provide global judgments, or trait reports, of their affective experience is a standard method for assessing trait affective well-being, with countless applications in the social sciences. Trait reports reflect numerous influences that generally go unnoticed. Although state affect is a highly plausible candidate for such influences, this source of unwanted variance does not rec...

While research on affective word processing in adults witnesses increasing interest, the present paper looks at another group of participants that have been neglected so far: pupils (age range: 6-12 years). Introducing a variant of the Berlin Affective Wordlist (BAWL) especially adapted for children of that age group, the "kidBAWL," we examined to what extent pupils process affective lexical se...

Work on facial expressions of emotions (Calder, Burton, Miller, Young, & Akamatsu, [2001]) and emotionally inflected speech (Banse & Scherer, [1996]) has successfully delineated some of the physical properties that underlie emotion recognition. To identify the acoustic cues used in the perception of nonverbal emotional expressions like laugher and screams, an investigation was conducted into vo...

The purpose of this study was to evaluate the selected International Affective Picture System (IAPS) pictures for an athlete population. A secondary focus was on whether ratings of IAPS pictures were related to personality traits. A total of 219 athletes participated in the study. Participants viewed 224 pictures that were selected from (IAPS). Ratings in terms of valence and arousal were obtai...

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. Moreove...

Self-Assessment Manikin (SAM) ratings were used to examine whether groups of 21 younger (M age = 20.02 years, SD = 2.28) and 21 older (M age = 66.26 years, SD = 5.64) adults had similar affective experiences to pictures from the International Affective Picture System (Lang, Bradley, & Cuthbert, 1997). The psychometrics of the SAM valence and arousal scales were also compared across age groups. ...