Sentence Norming Data
Description
We selected sentences that had previously been rated as emotionally 'neutral' (14 from Russ et al. (2008); 10 from Ben-David et al. (2011); and 2 from Mustafa et al. (2010) as well as 94 declarative sentences from the SPIN test Elliott (1995)), to a total of 120, for an online emotional valence norming study. The inclusion of the SPIN sentences permits a greater range of perceived valence. Participants: 48 native English speakers (mean age 19.7, sd = 2.1 years; recruited through the UC Davis subject pool) participated in the experiment online, via Qualtrics. Participants rated the emotion in all 120 sentences, which were randomly presented on the screen one at a time with no sound. On a given trial, they saw a sentence (e.g., "The sand was heaped in a pile.") and used a sliding scale to indicate how negative, positive, or neutral it was; the beginning, middle, and end of the spectrum were labeled with "0 = negative", "50 = neutral", and "100 = positive", respectively. The slider position reset to 50 at the beginning of each trial.