Differences in the ratings of valence and concreteness for verbal conceptsbetween depressive and nondepressive persons

This study tries to reveal differences in the valency and concreteness rati ngs for nouns, verbs, and adverbs between depressive (N = 20) and nondepres sive (N = 20) persons. For the valency ratings the results show significant differences between the two groups and between the syntactical categories as well as an interaction between the factors group and syntactical categor ies. For concreteness ratings we found a significant main effect for the gr oup factor, a significant interaction between group and syntactical categor ies, and also a significant three way interaction between group, syntactica l categories, and word valency. From these results it follows that, before conducting experiments in clinical psychology, one must establish the parti cipants' representation of words that are used as stimuli. Otherwise, resul ts could easily be misinterpreted as specific experimental results.