LexAffect Project

Emotions play a fundamental role in language learning, use and processing. Words denoting positivity account for a larger part of the lexicon than words denoting negativity, and they also tend to be used more frequently, a phenomenon known as positivity bias. The LexAffect project examines the impact of aging on the affective lexicon in a series of publications entitled:

• Affect across adulthood: Evidence from English, Dutch, and Spanish
• Valence norms for 3,600 English words collected during the COVID-19 pandemic: Effects of age and
• The pandemic and Temporal dynamics of emotional well-being and loneliness in older adults during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic: Insights from the Cognitive and Social Well-Being (CoSoWELL) corpus. (Currently under review)

As part of this project, we have also released a new set of valency norms for 3,600 English words collected during the COVID-19 pandemic from younger and older adults. The data are publicly available at OSF.