Affective norms for 380 Spanish words belonging to three different semantic categories

Emotional words are increasingly used in the study of word processing. To elucidate whether the experimental effects obtained with these words are due either to their affective content or to other semantic characteristics, it is necessary to conduct experiments with affectively valenced words obtained from different semantic categories. In the present article, we present affective ratings for 380 Spanish words belonging to three semantic categories: animals, people, and objects. The norms are based on the assessments made by 504 participants, who rated about 47 words either in valence and arousal, by using the Self-Assessment Manikin (Bradley & Lang, Journal of Behavioral Therapy and Experimental Psychiatry, 25, 49-59. 1994), or in concreteness and familiarity. These ratings will help researchers select stimuli for experiments in which both the affective properties of words and their membership to a given semantic category have to be taken into account. The database is available as an online supplement for this article.