Table 3.
Comparisons of negative and neutral words by One-Way-ANOVAs.
| Variable | Negative adjectives | Neutral adjectives | Negative nouns |
Neutral nouns |
F (3,119) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Valence | 2.77a | 5.09b | 2.63a | 5.13b | 125.42*** |
| (0.54) | (0.60) | (1.01) | (0.44) | ||
| Arousal | 5.74a | 3.53b | 5.90a | 2.45c | 97.43*** |
| (1.13) | (0.61) | (1.13) | (0.79) | ||
| Word length | 7.90 | 7.93 | 7.80 | 7.80 | 0.05 n.s |
| (1.83) | (1.68) | (1.50) | (1.16) | ||
|
Word frequency (per million) |
866.97 | 869.57 | 876.03 | 883.30 | < 0.01 n.s |
| (826.95) | (592.86) | (1211.61) | (945.56) | ||
|
Familiarity (absolute) |
11,338.27 | 14,363.63 | 6913.80 | 6716.20 | 0.72 n.s |
| (29,043.37) | (35,036.45) | (11,054.46) | (9483.73) | ||
|
Regularity (absolute) |
91.13 | 104.63 | 94.93 | 126.83 | 0.22 n.s |
| (247.53) | (238.44) | (100.61) | (97.49) | ||
| Neighbors Coltheart (absolute) | 3.03 | 3.70 | 4.70 | 3.10 | 0.77 n.s |
| (2.51) | (3.48) | (5.50) | (6.60) | ||
| Neighbors Levenshtein (absolute) | 5.50 | 7.27 | 8.60 | 7.50 | 1.08 n.s |
| (4.55) | (5.38) | (7.30) | (8.99) |
All categories contained 30 adjectives/nouns each. *** = p ≤ 0.001. Standard deviations appear in parentheses below means; means in the same row sharing the same superscript letter do not differ significantly from one another at p ≤ 0.05 based on LSD test post-hoc comparisons.