Perception of emotion across cultures: Norms of valence, arousal, and sensory experience for 4923 Chinese words translated from English in Warriner et al. (2013)

Abstract

Perception of emotion conveyed through language is influenced by embodied experiences obtained from social interactions, which may vary across different cultures. To explore cross-cultural differences in the perception of emotion between Chinese and English speakers, this study collected norms of valence and arousal from 322 native Mandarin speakers for 4923 Chinese words translated from Warriner et al., (Behavior Research Methods, 45, 1191-1207, 2013). Additionally, sensory experience ratings for each word were collected. Analysis demonstrated that the reliability of this dataset is satisfactory, as indicated by comparisons with previous datasets. We examined the distributions of valence and arousal for the entire dataset, as well as for positive and negative emotion categories. Further analysis suggested that valence, arousal, and sensory experience correlated with various psycholinguistic variables, including the number of syllables, number of strokes, imageability, familiarity, concreteness, frequency, and age of acquisition. Cross-language comparison indicated that native speakers of Chinese and English differ in their perception of emotional valence and arousal, largely due to cross-cultural variations associated with ecological, sociopolitical, and religious factors. This dataset will be a valuable resource for research examining the impact of emotional and sensory information on Chinese lexical processing, as well as for bilingual research investigating the interplay between language and emotion across different cultural contexts.

Keywords: Arousal; Cultural differences; Emotion; Sensory experience; Valence.