{"pk":49544,"title":"From positive to negative \"craziness\": Changes in emotional valence of words across adulthood","subtitle":null,"abstract":"Accumulating knowledge and experience across the lifespan are bound to have an impact on the meaning of words. Here, we investigated this idea using primarily emotional valence of words as a test-case. We used French databases that gather psycholinguistic variables including emotional valence of words, in four groups of individuals including young (18-25; 26-39 years), middle-aged (40-59 years) and older (>60 years) adults. Following the hypothesis that words may display age-related differences in their psycholinguistic properties, we computed linear regressions over all individual words as a function of age-groups. Results revealed notably that between 5 and 10% of words show significant linear changes of emotional valence as a function of age. This pattern highlights the situated and flexible nature of word meanings and suggests that self-relevance of experience affects semantic memory.","language":"eng","license":{"name":"","short_name":"","text":null,"url":""},"keywords":[{"word":"Linguistics; Psychology; Emotion; Situated cognition"}],"section":"Papers with Poster Presentation","is_remote":true,"remote_url":"https://escholarship.org/uc/item/0n82m850","frozenauthors":[{"first_name":"Rapha‘l","middle_name":"","last_name":"Fargier","name_suffix":"","institution":"UniversitŽ Côte d'Azur","department":""},{"first_name":"Claire","middle_name":"","last_name":"Ballot","name_suffix":"","institution":"Nantes University","department":""}],"date_submitted":null,"date_accepted":null,"date_published":"2025-01-01T19:00:00+01:00","render_galley":null,"galleys":[{"label":"PDF","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/49544/galley/37506/download/"}]}