EmCat: Cataloguing Basic Emotions

Across Languages

In psycholinguistics we’ve long used words to tap into their underlying mental representations. In order to do that we need a range of normative data on both the words and the representations. We usually obtain such data through norming studies and compiling their results in to databases. This is the key objective of the EmCat (Emotion Catalogue) Project, which aims to compile databases of norms for the complete lexicalizations of basic emotions in English and in Polish. By lexicalizations here we mean all the words that denote basic emotions of anger, disgust, fear, joy, sadness, and surprise, as well as their synonyms. The project has three stages, two of which have been funded by the National Science Center, Poland - Research Grant SONATA 13, Ref. No. 2017/26/D/HS6/00035 “Basic Emotion Terms Catalogue - Polish & English.”

Stage 1

The first stage is now completed. It covered logging all the lexicalizations using linguistic expertise and lexicographic materials. Specifically, we trawled monolingual thesauri and dictionaries of Polish and English to find all the synonyms of the words denoting basic emotion terms in noun, verb, and adjective forms.

Stage 2

The completion of the second stage has been delayed by the breakout of the Covid pandemic, but is now largely completed. At this stage we are collecting data from smaller population samples in strictly controlled laboratory conditions and performing exploratory analyses. The measures collected include: valence, arousal, dominance, concreteness, imageability, context availability, causality, categorization, and primary associations.

Stage 3

The third stage is planned for the future. This stage will include using online survey tools like the MTurk to collect normative data from large, representative population samples. This stage will involve a more narrow and streamlined selection of words from EmCat-Eng and EmCat-Pol to improve the applicability of both resources for general psycholinguistic research purposes.

Research Grant SONATA 13, Ref. No. 2017/26/D/HS6/00035, Basic Emotion Terms Catalogue – Polish & English

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