Abstract
We introduce the Berlin Affective Word List (BAWL) in order to provide researchers with a German database containing both emotional valence and imageability ratings for more than 2,200 German words. The BAWL was cross-validated using a forced choice valence decision task in which two distinct valence categories (negative or positive) had to be assigned to a highly controlled selection of 360 words according to varying emotional content (negative, neutral, or positive). The reaction time (RT) results corroborated the valence categories: Words that had been rated as “neutral” in the norms yielded maximum RTs. The BAWL is intended to help researchers create stimulus materials for a wide range of experiments dealing with the emotional processing of words.
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M.L.-H.V. is now at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München.
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Võ, M.L.H., Jacobs, A.M. & Conrad, M. Cross-validating the Berlin Affective Word List. Behavior Research Methods 38, 606–609 (2006). https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03193892
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03193892