The Dictionary of Affect in Language as a Tool for the Assessment of Affective Tone in a Descriptive Task

Abstract

148 subjects were asked to describe the terms mathematics, physics, television, newspapers, biology, and technology in terms of a list of five additional words. Responses produced by subjects were scored for two dimensions of affective tone (activation, evaluation) by matching words to the Dictionary of Affect in Language that includes scores for the two dimensions for several thousand commonly used words. Clear differences in affective tone emerged from this scoring procedure: mathematics and physics received the least positive evaluative descriptions, while television was described in most active and rousing terms and biology in most inactive terms. Women gave more negative (lower evaluation) descriptions for mathematics than did men, which satisfied one of the a priori predictions of the study.