Biomedical subjects

C Whissell

Publications and source records attributed to C Whissell.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

PubMed2001

The emotionality of William Blake's poems: a quantitative comparison of Songs of Innocence with Songs of Experience.

Analyses of the words contained in William Blake's Songs of Experience and Songs of Innocence with the new Dictionary of Affect, a tool listing the pleasantness, activation, and imagery of several thousand words, indicated that the Innocence poems were both more pleasant and more active than the Experience poems. On the whole, both sets of poems were richly imaged, rather pleasant in tone, and more emotional than both normative English and the work of Blake's Romantic contemporaries.

Affect↗

PubMed2001

Cues to referent gender in randomly constructed names.

50 volunteers' assignments of gender to 32 randomly constructed names confirmed previous findings with respect to the structure of actual names (men's names are shorter, women's names tend to end in vowels, especially the schwa vowel) and with respect to the emotionality of sounds in actual names (men's names sound more Active, Nasty, and Unpleasant; women's names sound softer). Assignment of sex to random names was predictable (R>.8) on the basis of combinations of these variables.

Adult↗

PubMed1999

Phonosymbolism and the emotional nature of sounds: evidence of the preferential use of particular phonemes in texts of differing emotional tone.

This article addresses the emotional meaning (phonosymbolism) of the most basic unit of language--the phoneme. Language excerpts from many sources were transcribed phonetically with the help of a computer program. The distributions of phonemes in different sources (song lyrics, poetry, word lists, advertisements) were correlated with the emotionality of the language along two dimensions (activation, evaluation) which had been rated by the Dictionary of Affect using another computer program. Significant results characterized all phases of the analysis. Phonemes were distributed differently in different language samples. Frequency of phonemes in a language sample as well as frequency of phonemes in individual words were correlated with emotion. For example, the phoneme /l/ (the one appearing twice in the word lullaby) was used more often in pleasant language samples, in soft or tender language samples, and in passive words. The phoneme /r/ (appearing twice in the word roar) was found more often in unpleasant words and in active words. Possible sources of the relationship between sound production and emotion are discussed.

Affect↗

PubMed1999

Holding emotional and linguistic rulers up to the poetry of Robert Frost.

The words in a large and representative sample of Robert Frost's poetry were compared with information in several data bases which provided estimates of the poetry's pleasantness, arousal, emotionality, imagery, and linguistic complexity. Findings confirmed that Frost's poetry was linguistically simple and emotionally restrained in comparison to that of his cohort. They also highlighted the increasing variability in Frost's poetry across time and its decreasing imagery. Frost's poetry was more restrained than that of his male cohort but similar to the poetry of his female cohort in its linguistic simplicity. Frost's acknowledged death poems were in fact quite pleasant and passive in emotional tone.

Arousal↗

PubMed1998

Emotion and style in 30-second television advertisements targeted at men, women, boys, and girls.

A program for objective textual analysis which incorporated measures of style, word emotionality, and word imagery, was used to score the verbal portion of 152 30-sec. television advertisements. This analysis indicated that advertisements directed at children were more active, longer, and less negative than those directed at adults. A comparison of advertisements directed at males and females regardless of age showed greater linguistic complexity (more words, fewer common words) when their text was directed at women and girls. Each of the 13 stylistic and emotional measures used to describe advertisements produced at least one significant difference associated with the age or the sex of the target population or their interaction.

Adult↗

PubMed1998

Objective analysis of text: II. Using an emotional compass to describe the emotional tone of situation comedies.

Transcripts for episodes from 9 situation comedies (roughly 27,000 words in total) were scored by the program TEXT.NLZ in terms of emotional tone. To promote ease of interpretation scores for the dimensions of pleasantness and activation were depicted as vectors in a normative emotional space. Both numerical and figural representations of the data indicated that the words used in situation comedies were pleasant and mildly active, with small differences occurring between comedies. The emotional characteristics of situation comedies stood out in comparison to those of several other texts depicted in the same emotional space.

Classification↗

PubMed1997

Changes in women's emotions as a function of emotion valence, self-determined category of premenstrual distress, and day in the menstrual cycle.

A confirmatory study where 20 women completed Plutchik and Kellerman's Emotions Profile Index in a daily prospective rating of emotions supported previous findings of mood fluctuations across the menstrual cycle. Positive moods peaked at or about the time of ovulation and negative ones at or about the time of menstruation. However, significant interactions indicated that a pronounced shift in mood was only characteristic of women who rated themselves as "sufferers" of premenstrual discomfort and not of those who rated themselves as experiencing very mild discomfort.

Adult↗

PubMed1997

Pleasantness, activation, and sex differences in advertising.

Advertisements in men's, women's, girls', and boys' magazines (n = 38,195 words) were scored objectively in terms of 15 measures of linguistic style, e.g., use of common words, use of long words, use of specific words and emotional tone (pleasantness and activation, as measured by the Dictionary of Affect). There were several sex- and age-related differences among advertisements from different sources. Advertisements from boys' magazines were extremely active, those from women's and girls' magazines were shorter and unusually pleasant. In two follow-up studies (N = 122 volunteers), objective emotional measures of advertising text proved to be related to ratings of persuasion and of success of appeal for individual advertisements. The most preferred advertisement for women was pleasant and active, that for men unpleasant and active. When men and women created advertisements, women's were shorter and more pleasant.

Adolescent↗

PubMed1996

The modal study on premenstrual syndrome or tension: a content analysis of 315 recent abstracts along global dimensions.

From 315 abstracts from Psychological Abstracts (January 1990-February 1996), the modal current study dealing with premenstrual syndrome or tension has a within-subjects design and includes 20 to 80 nonpathological subjects. Conclusions based on prospective self-reports are that negative psychological and somatic ratings increase premenstrually or menstrually and that changes are more pronounced (and scores higher) for groups who are identified with symptoms.

Female↗

PubMed1995

The false recognition of mood-matched and mood-opposite words in a memory task: introduction of a delayed testing condition.

This report details the results of an extended replication with 74 new subjects of Whissell, Marshall, and Whissell's 1990 study. In confirmation of the original study and two follow-up studies, subjects tended to recognize words falsely as having belonged to a list if these words matched the emotional mood of the list but not if they had an opposite mood (mood was defined in terms of the pleasantness and activity dimensions of emotion). For delayed testing (one week), this effect was even more pronounced as false recognitions for mood-matching words become as frequent as correct recognitions for words actually on the list.

Affect↗

PubMed1994

Emotional descriptors of words as predictors of recall in a paired-associate task.

An extended replication of Contini and Whissell's 1992 experiment (N = 64 subjects) confirmed that there is a recall disadvantage for emotional words, especially active words, whether these serve as the cue or as the associate in a paired-associate task. A regression formula with trials, two gender variables, and seven emotional predictors (R2 = .77) was successful in predicting recall for 160 trials. Words or their CVC associates were better recalled if the words were emotionally neutral and least well recalled if the words were active or both unpleasant and passive.

Adult↗

PubMed1994

Differences among slopes and intercepts for regression lines predicting children's connotative and denotative knowledge of familiar and unfamiliar words on the basis of age.

90 children from Grades 2, 4, and 6 were asked to define words and to rate them in terms of emotional meaning. Significant differences among criterion means and among slopes and intercepts of lines predicting definitional and emotional accuracy on the basis of age suggest that knowledge about the pleasantness of familiar words (pleasantness accuracy) begins early, is high, and asymptotes earlier in comparison to definitional knowledge or to the WISC-R Vocabulary subtest in which knowledge (accuracy) begins to grow at a later age, grows faster, and does not reach the same over-all mean.

Child↗

PubMed1994

The position of sex-typical words in two-dimensional emotion space.

Data from five experiments (total N = 304) were used to examine differences in assignments of sex-typicality to personality-describing words. The several significant differences were interpreted in terms of the location of male-typical and female-typical words in two-dimensional emotion space. Words judged as typical of women were consistently more pleasant and less active than those judged as typical of men. The report includes tables of over 200 sex-typical words.

Adult↗

PubMed1993

When children talk about the causes of their emotions, how well do adults and other children understand which emotion they are talking about?

100 subjects from Grade 2, Grade 5, and university levels decoded statements describing the antecedents of seven emotions produced by Kindergarten and Grade 8 students. The experiment was designed to determine whether adults and different children could correctly identify the emotions whose causes were being described by the children. Accuracy in decoding increased with age of decoder, but subjects from Grade 2 were better at decoding statements made by Kindergarten children while adults were better at decoding statements produced by Grade 8 subjects. Even for statements generated by Kindergarten children, however, adults were better decoders than subjects from Grades 2 or 5. The emotions of happiness and comfort were decoded most accurately, those of anger and guilt least accurately. Several other significant effects are reported, involving the age of origin, the age of respondent, and sex of origin and emotion. A cognitive developmental theory such as Piaget's is selected as best explaining the results reported above.

Adult↗

PubMed1993

A memory advantage for serial lists composed of active words.

Results from subject-wise and word-wise analyses of recall for four types of emotional lists memorized by 14 subjects confirm that active words (pleasant and active, unpleasant and active) are better recalled than passive words (pleasant and passive, unpleasant and passive). The standardized formula 'recall = .68 (serial position) + .24 (activation)' successfully predicts 53% (R = .73) of variance in the recall criterion.

Adult↗

PubMed1992

Memory disadvantages for CVC associates of emotional words.

A paired-associate task (word-CVC) performed by 40 subjects confirmed that associates to active emotional words were less well remembered than associates to neutral words or pleasant or unpleasant ones. Results are interpreted as satisfactorily explained by differences in the activation of network nodes if such differences were in turn affected by the arousal characteristic of the words.

Adult↗

PubMed1991

An heuristic for the study of the effects of emotion on memory.

This report contains an heuristic (a systematic set of questions) addressing issues of concern in the emotion-memory literature. Four experiments (ns of 73, 24, 160, and 34) are described in terms of the heuristic and its potential for describing the literature is examined.

Attention↗

PubMed1991

Children's understanding of facial expression of emotion: II. Drawing of emotion-faces.

67 children from Grades 2, 4, and 7 drew faces representing the emotional expressions of fear, anger, surprise, disgust, happiness, and sadness. The children themselves and 29 adults later decoded the drawings in an emotion-recognition task. Children were the more accurate decoders, and their accuracy and the accuracy of adults increased significantly for judgments of 7th-grade drawings. The emotions happy and sad were most accurately decoded. There were no significant differences associated with sex. In their drawings, children utilized a symbol system that seems to be based on a highlighting or exaggeration of features of the innately governed facial expression of emotion.

Age Factors↗