Measure the Feel of Language.
Whissell Dictionary of Affect.
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The Whissell Dictionary of Affect in Language is a tool for the statistical analysis of individual words, not according to their meaning, but they way they ‘feel’. Words have meanings that go past their definitions, and they way we use them says a lot about our mood and state of mind.
The Whissell Dictionary of Affect in language lets you measure the mood of the words in a text file.
The Whissell Dictionary lets you look at the mood of speech in situ, as it is in the person’s mind. Of course, it’s not perfect, but for the spoken word (once it’s transcribed), it allows a measure of the person’s state of mind without using questionnaires, brain imaging, or biological tests.
It quantifies Pleasantness, Activation, and Imagery for emotional ones.
To use it, you enter a block of text, or a text file, or a folder of text files into the program, and you then analyze them to learn their values for Pleasantness, Activation, and Imagery of common English words.
Imagery is how easily the word calls an image to mind.
Activation is how active the word feels
Pleasantness is how pleasant the word feels
It quantifies Pleasantness, Activation, and Imagery for emotional words ones.
Scores of volunteers rated words for these three qualities. The average ratings for all the words that were analyzed this way were used to assign a value to each word. 348,000 words were rated in this way, covering 90% of spoken English (not technical vocabulary).
It has been used to analyze the Lyrics of Beatles songs and The Bible, among other texts.
Whissell, Cynthia. “Comparison of the books of the New Testament (English Translation) in terms of emotion and word use.” Psychological reports 98, no. 1 (2006): 57-64.
The Whissell Dictionary lets you look at the mood of speech in situ, as it is in the person’s mind. Of course, it’s not perfect, but for the spoken word (once it’s transcribed), it allows a measure of the person’s state of mind without using questionnaires, brain imaging, or biological tests.
The scores for pleasantness range from unpleasant (1) to pleasant (3).
The average for pleasantness in spoken English is 1.85 (with a standard deviation of .36)
The scores for activation range from passive (1) to active(3).
The average for activation in spoken English is 1.67 (with a standard deviation of .36)
The scores for imagery range from 1 (word evokes no image) to 3 (word evokes an image very easily).
The average for Imagery in spoken English is 1.52 (with a standard deviation of .63)
Because fewer ‘raters’ were used to establish an average value for how easily the word called an image (Imagery) to mind, the values for Imagery are only given to two decimal places.
Interesting note:
If you analyze all the words in the dictionary, you’ll find a small difference between the averages for words in the dictionary, and the mean values for English language. This appears because the word list is just a list of words, which doesn’t reflect common speech. The word “A” (as in “a ball”) only occurs once in the dictionary, but can appear in common speech many times, even in a short sample. This difference creates a difference in the averages for ordinary speech and for the dictionary itself.
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