Conveying (discrete) emotionality with novel words.

Area of Science:

• Cognitive Psychology
• Linguistics
• Neuroscience

Background:

• Affective dimensions (valence, arousal) and discrete emotions explain word semantics.
• Humans can assign emotionality to pseudowords (novel words).
• Previous research focused on valence and arousal, with limited investigation into discrete emotions.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate humans' ability to generate novel words conveying discrete emotions.
• To examine humans' ability to decode the emotionality of these generated novel words.
• To explore the encoding and decoding of affective information in novel words.

Main Methods:

• Three experiments were conducted.
• Participants generated novel word stimuli for emotional words.
• Word embedding models were used to analyze affective information.
• Decoding performance for discrete emotions was assessed.

Main Results:

• Individuals reliably encoded novel conceptual information with affective content across all emotion categories.
• Decoding performance was better for anger, fear, and happiness stimuli.
• Encoding of novel affective information was consistent across discrete emotions.

Conclusions:

• Humans can systematically encode and decode discrete emotions in novel words.
• Findings support an evolutionary perspective on affective processing.
• Results have implications for language and emotional models of affective features.