Table 3.
Summary of emotional and lexical properties of the word categories used in Experiment 2
| Word category |
||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Pleasant (n = 36) | Neutral (n = 34) | Unpleasant (n = 36) | Death-related (n = 34) | |
| M (s.d.) | M (s.d.) | M (s.d.) | M (s.d.) | |
| Arousal | 3.05 (0.38) | 1.62 (0.03) | 3.17 (0.35) | 3.17 (0.44) |
| Valence | 6.01 (0.38) | 4.17 (0.37) | 1.99 (0.37) | 2.20 (0.67) |
| Imageability | 5.75 (0.54) | 5.75 (0.88) | 5.19 (0.56) | 5.23 (0.69) |
| Death-relatedness | 1.13 (0.19) | 1.23 (0.24) | 2.57 (0.67) | 4.49 (0.30) |
| N letters | 6.85 (1.79) | 7.58 (1.23) | 7.32 (1.43) | 7.08 (2.18) |
| N phonemes | 6.06 (1.59) | 6.58 (1.38) | 6.59 (1.46) | 6.64 (2.09) |
| N syllables | 6.06 (1.59) | 6.58 (1.38) | 6.59 (1.46) | 6.64 (2.09) |
| N neighbors | 1.18 (2.07) | 1.06 (1.72) | 0.79 (1.70) | 1.56 (2.22) |
| Word frequencya | 32.25 (32.81) | 27.00 (28.30) | 29.28 (25.35) | 21.89 (38.76) |
| Type bigram frequency | 4129.91 (2195.17) | 4500.35 (1841.27) | 4531.50 (1822.99) | 4887.17 (2686.32) |
aWe were unable to determine word frequency of two death-related words (‘mortician’ and ‘crypt’) because they were not present in the CELEX database. Thus, we had to exclude them during the calculation of mean word frequency.