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Social context effects on emotional language: The influence of the COVID-19 pandemic on the emotional evaluation of words.

Planchuelo, C., Baciero, A., Hinojosa, J.A., Perea, M. and Duñabeitia, J.A., 2022. Social context effects on emotional language: The influence of the COVID-19 pandemic on the emotional evaluation of words. Acta Psychologica, 229 (September), 103686.

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DOI: 10.1016/j.actpsy.2022.103686

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has altered our routines, our conversations, the specific social contexts in which we hear or use certain words, and potentially, the representation of the words related to the disease and its consequences. Here we investigated whether the effects of the pandemic have changed the representation of the affective features of COVID-19-related words. To this aim, we collected new ratings of valence (from unpleasant to pleasant) and arousal (from calm to activated) dimensions for COVID-19-related words (e.g., hospital) and COVID-19-unrelated words (e.g., whale). Subsequently, we compared these scores with those from databases that reported ratings for the same pool of words before the pandemic. Our results showed significant changes in arousal for COVID-19-related words but not unrelated words, thus revealing that the pandemic social context modified their affective representation. These findings support the flexibility of emotional representations and the malleability and dynamicity of the mental lexicon as a function of contextual factors.

Item Type:Article
ISSN:0001-6918
Uncontrolled Keywords:Emotional words; COVID-19; Semantic representation; Lexical processing; Arousal
Group:Faculty of Science & Technology
ID Code:37326
Deposited By: Symplectic RT2
Deposited On:08 Aug 2022 08:46
Last Modified:08 Aug 2022 08:46

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