The development of a corpus of emotional words produced by children and adolescents

In order to develop a source of emotional words for use in studies of cogni tive processing in children and adolescents, 221 students comprising 109 pr imary school students (62 girls and 47 boys) and 112 secondary school stude nts (68 girls and 44 boys) were asked to imagine a scene about an emotional state, such as happiness, and then to generate as many single words as the y could to describe this feeling. Subjects were also asked to generate word s which would instigate this emotional state. Results showed that subjects produced around 21,000 words in total, with a mean of 96.78 (S.D. = 34.68) per subject. Secondary school students produced significantly more words th an primary school students in four categories: negative adjective, sad feel ing, sad thing and scary thing. When subjects were divided into three age g roups, the results revealed that subjects aged over 14 years produced signi ficantly more words than two other groups aged less than 11 years and betwe en 11 and 14 years. The oldest group also produced significantly more words than the other two groups in a number of categories. Girls produced signif icantly more words than boys. Girls also produced significantly more words in all categories except happy feeling and scary feeling. A corpus of the 2 5 most frequent words in each of the 10 categories is appended. (C) 1999 El sevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.