Categories and stimuli descriptions

The IADS (sounds) categories include happiness (n=29), fear (n=14), anger (n=1; apparently car horns are the only sound to trigger this...), disgust (n=6), and sadness (n=4; Stevenson and James, 2008).

Examples of categorized IADS sounds include...
-Happy: carousel, giggling, colonial music, etc.
-Sad: baby cry, (and with less distinction in the data:) puppy cry, funeral, and bagpipes
-Disgust: nose blow, toilet flush, belch, etc.
-Fear: female screams (1 and 2), prowler, howling rain, and many others with less distinction
-Anger: only car horns


The ANEW (English words) categories are anger (n=8), fear (n=5), sadness (n=7), disgust (n=14), and happiness (n=323; with so many of the words under this broad category, I'll want to make distinctions within later; Stevenson, Mikels, and James, 2007).

Examples for ANEW stimuli under categories...
-Happiness: abundance, bless, dazzle, food, improve, mail, pancakes, sky, wink, etc.
-Anger: disturb, mad, noisy, etc.
-Fear: afraid, fear, fearful, horror, terrified
-Sadness: burial, dreary, gloom, misery, etc.
-Disgust: filth, grime, maggot, mucus, rancid, etc.

(Those last few are pretty bad-- I'm not sure I can stomach a "disgust" dance!)
I also need to note that some of the words are redundant to the category. For example, under Anger, are the words "anger" and "angry;" above you can see this is a problem for Fear as well. That narrows down the number of useful words for those categories, so I may rely more on other kinds of stimuli for those categories. I wonder if it is in the nature of the medium to have more triggers for some emotions than others.


It's interesting to note that some stimuli which may have the same dimensions can actually trigger different kinds of brain activation; these happen to be in different categories. This supports the need to consider multiple ways of describing emotions, dimensionally, and categorically (Stevenson et al, 2008)- and soon, I'll be writing about a text that defines emotions with a structural model.

Resources:
Stevenson & James, (2008).
Stevenson, Mikels, & James, (2007).