Emotaix.pt: A Tool for Analyzing Emotional Vocabulary in European Portuguese

Sara Costa

I Congreso Internacional de Psicología, Salud y Educación (CIPSE 2017), Oviedo, Spain

The interest in writing as a helpful tool for dealing with deeply charged emotional experiences grew notorious when Pennebaker established the expressive writing paradigm. Expressive writing is a technique in which a person writes during four days (15 minutes per day) about a personal deeply charged emotional event, either negative (e.g., a trauma) or positive (e.g., a major achievement). The expressive writing paradigm has, in recent years, become a common basis for different psychological interventions that have proved effective in reducing psychological disturbance and improving physical and emotional health, psychological well-being, and personal growth. Nevertheless, the mechanism by which those healing effects occur has not yet been fully uncovered. Linguistic processing triggered by writing exercise seem to play a role, as well as the enactment of autobiographical memories by writing, but these need to be further explored. The main purpose of this paper is to present a tool (EMOTAIX.PT) for exploring the Portuguese emotional and affective vocabulary used in written texts. EMOTAIX.PT is the Portuguese adaption of the French database EMOTAIX. It comprises about 4000 Portuguese emotion words organized by their valence (positive vs. negative) and nature (semantic category). This tool offers a fine-grained analysis of the emotional lexicon that along with valence, structures semantic categories around three hierarchical levels (viz., global, intermediate, and specific). The global level contains 6 major opposing semantic categories (e.g., malevolence vs. benevolence), the intermediate level comprises 18 categories (e.g., hate), and the specific level contains 50 categories (e.g., resentment). The validity of EMOTAIX.PT was tested in a pilot expressive writing study. The findings allowed attesting the validity of EMOTAIX.PT and the reliability of the basic expressive writing paradigm. Furthermore, it offered preliminary evidence on the usefulness of EMOTAIX.PT as a tool for exploring the affective vocabulary of the Portuguese language.

Costa, S. (November, 2017). Emotaix.PT: A tool for analysing affective vocabulary in European Portuguese. In R. A. Alves, Exploring affective dimensions in writing and maths. Symposium conducted at the I Congreso Internacional de Psicología, Salud y Educación, Oviedo.

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