СРАВНИТЕЛЬНЫЙ АНАЛИЗ ЭКСПЕРТНЫХ ОЦЕНОК ДВУХСЛОЖНЫХ СЛОВ РУССКОГО ЯЗЫКА ПО ПАРАМЕТРУ «ЭМОЦИОНАЛЬНОСТЬ», ПРОВЕДЕННЫХ В 1989 И 2009 ГГ.

Научная статья
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.18454/RULB.7.27
Выпуск: № 3 (7), 2016
PDF

Аннотация

В работе проводится сравнительный анализ экспертных оценок (ЭО) двусложных существительных русского языка, выполненных с разницей в 20 лет: в 1989(ЭО1) и 2009гг. (ЭО2). Конструирование стимульного материала осуществлялось следующим образом. Из словаря С.И. Ожегова (1987) были выписаны все двусложные существительные за исключением слов, употребляемых как прямые инвективы. Их оказалось 4262 в 1987г и 4234 в 2009г. После этого они были предъявлены группе экспертов. В качестве экспертов были выбраны 10 человек, 5 мужчин и 5 женщин в возрасте от 28 до 38 лет. В дальнейшем было проведено сопоставление независимой экспертизы, проведенной в 1989г. с двумя другими оценками эмоциональной значимости слов: неосознаваемой оценкой испытуемых, фиксированной в психофизиологических параметрах, и их осознанной оценкой этих же слов. Было выявлено, что осознанная индивидуальная и экспертная оценки соответствуют друг другу на 83,9%. Таким образом, с помощью процедуры ЭО оказывается возможным выделить три класса слов (нейтральные, слабоэмоциональные, сильноэмоциональные) градуально нарастающей эмоциональности. Они объективно различаются по физиологическим коррелятам эмоционального реагирования и эффективности воспроизведения. Через 20 лет, в 2009 г., процедуру ЭО была повторена с новыми экспертами, соответствующими тем критериям, которые были описаны для первой группы экспертов. Из 4262 двусложных слов русского языка -3,8% (ЭО1)и 3,5% (ЭО2). Экспертную оценку 10 не получило ни одно положительно окрашенное слово. Сравнительный анализ двух ЭО позволил прийти к заключению, что экспертная оценка эмоциональной значимости слов свидетельствует о существенной роли социальных и культурных факторов в процессе приписывания индивидуумом эмоциональной значимости тому или иному слову.

“The meaningful word is a microcosm of human consciousness.”

Lev Simyonovich Vygotsky

Introduction

Emotions lend themselves poorly to any sort of objective description because of their subjectivity.  It is for this reason that a researcher has to be content with the appraisal a person gives of their own emotions.  At the same time, it is known that a person does not always properly evaluate their own emotions, especially if they touch upon conflictogenic zones or manifest themselves in a stressful situation.  How appropriately a person appraises their own emotional state is determined by the educational system.  It also depends on the circumstances in which they, as a child, learned how to coordinate physiologo-biochemical changes with their own and others’ emotional expression, emotional distress, their own interpretation of events, and the tag given to their emotional state by the society [9].

One of the possible methods for getting an objective view of emotionality is to do an expert appraisal. The effectiveness of such an approach is demonstrated in those places where elements that cannot be expressed in words are analyzed[1],[2], and this applies in full to emotions. 

Numerous expert appraisals of Russian words have been carried out.  Moreover, coefficients for the parameters of meaning under evaluation have been calculated, i.e. the arithmetical mean for the scores of particular test groups has been found.  The first coefficients for the emotional values of nouns were computed by E.M. Kovalevskaya and M.N. Shorina [4].

To quote E. N. Kolodkina [5], “According to the scales of concreteness, vividness and emotionality and depending on the extent to which the experimental variables are expressive, the distribution of the words on the list used in the study shows that it is impossible for a person to consciously distinguish the specific from the abstract, the vivid from the vague, and the emotional from the unemotional” . She conducted an expert appraisal of 215 Russian nouns. The test subjects (there were 250 of them) evaluated words as vivid, concrete or emotional on a scale of 1 to 7. “Concreteness” was understood as the ability of the object that the word signified to be perceived tangibly; “vividness”, as its capacity to evoke a sensuous image; and “emotionality” as its power to induce an association connected with what the word designates. The coefficients on the emotionality scale ranged from 1.76 (for the word “hierarchy”) to 6.74 (for “merrymaking”). A high correlation between vividness and concreteness was revealed, but there was no such interconnection between concreteness and emotionality. A high degree of emotionality disclosed for the following words: “love” (6.33), “music” (6.01), “war” (5.78), “accident” (5.34), “cinema” (5.24), “sea” (5.16) and “speed” (5.01).  An average degree of emotionality was shown by these words:  “traffic” (3.09), “arm” (3.26), “moon” (3.56), “noise” (3.72), “horse” (3.79), “cunning” (4.02), “show-off” (4.86), “blabbermouth” (4.69) and “woman” (4.66). And a low degree was received for these: “nothing” (2.42), “crony” (2.42), “paper” (2.44), “lam;” (2.75) and “union” (2.96).

It is known that a person’s information-processing process is most effective when at an optimum level of activation. This thesis exists as the Law of the Inverted-U [15]. L. Breitkopf [14] hypothesized that, in compliance with this law, there was also a dependent relationship between the level of activation and the scaling of emotions. In practical terms, this means that the maximum variability in the test subjects’ responses should be observed under optimum activation, which means that the influence of the activation level on the scaling of emotions will depend on the scaling technique. He conducted an experiment that confirmed this hypothesis. He showed that with an increase in the activation level the overall number of choices on the “list of designated emotions” decreases in a linear fashion.  This calls into question an axiom of the classical testing theory in the field of scaling emotions, i.e. that the amount of information is covariant with the activation level only where the test material permits it to be so. This author believes that it is imperative to discuss the extent to which the scaling technique is sensitive to the activation level with whoever is to measure the emotions.

At the same time, an expert appraisal differs from an evaluation of words by ordinary test subjects. The more test subjects there are who participate in such an evaluation, the more emotionally colored words there will be from one and the same set of words. On the one hand, this is contingent on the incredibly broad experience that people have with the acquisition of words in their own language, and, on the other hand, on the history of how words enter a language, since, when they make their appearance, there is no doubt that they bring along with them a particular element of emotionality. 

As distinct from test subjects, a group of experts evaluates the emotionality of words in a language not only on the basis of their own experience but also on their knowledge of the state of the society at a given stage in its evolution.  This is what sparked our interest in comparing expert analyses of one and the same set of words done at different stages in the development of Russian society. We chose two moments: 1989, which was at the end of Perestroika, and 2009, a time that most experts consider to have been extremely stable. 

A Description of the Study Procedures

The stimulus material was organized in the following way. All of the disyllabic nouns in the Ozhegov Dictionary of the Russian Language (1994 edition) were extracted, with the exception of those that are used as downright invective [3]. It turned out that there were 4,262 of them in 1989 and 1,234 in 2009. They were then presented to a group of experts. Ten people between the ages of 28 and 38 were selected as experts, five men and five women. All of them had a higher education and were engaged in scholarly research.

The experts were given the following instructions: “Carefully read through the list of words below. Put a “+” next to those words that evoke pleasant associations and a “-” next to those that evoke negative ones. Do not put anything next to words that, in your opinion, are not emotionally charged.” Later on, those words that were not delineated as emotionally positive or negative by any of the experts, or by only one or two of them, were considered to be neutral. Those that were singled out by from three to six experts were deemed to be mildly emotional, and those that were tagged by seven or more were judged to be strongly emotional. Three classes of stimuli with gradually mounting emotionality, determined by using a probabilistic procedure, can be used as a tool that makes it possible to receive an objective differential evaluation of a person’s emotional reactions. This method has proved to be particularly informative when testing individuals with psychosocial adjustment disorders [6].

The comparison of psycho-physiological factors recorded during the apperception process, involving words of different classes that had been pinpointed by the expert analysis, showed that expert analyses are rather highly effective:  words relating to different classes elicited highly significant differences in the psycho-physiological reactions of the test subjects. Depending on an increase in emotionality, the amplitude of the skin galvanic responses and the latency periods for the generation of associations gradually rose as well [6].

At a later point, in 1989, a comparison of the independent expert appraisal with two other appraisals of the emotional value of words was made:  an unconscious evaluation of the test subjects, recorded in psycho-physiological parameters, and a conscious evaluation of the same words.

To determine the emotional value of the words, we used the following parameters: the amplitude of the skin galvanic responses, the latency periods for an associative response and a motor reaction, and the share of correctly repeated words of diverse emotional coloring. It was found that the conscious individual appraisal and the expert appraisal matched each other in 83.9 percent of the instances (Table 1). Any divergence in the appraisals was a function of a test subject’s individual experience and was not attributable to a particular class of words [9].

Thus, with the help of this procedure – the expert appraisal – it is possible, as it turns out, to single out three classes of words (neutral, mildly emotional and strongly emotional) of gradually increasing emotionality. They differ objectively according to the physiological correlatives of the emotional responses and the effectiveness of the procedure. 

Part of the expert appraisal that was carried out (those words considered to be emotional by more than six experts) is included in an appendix to this article.

Twenty years later, in 2009, the expert appraisal was repeated, with a new panel of experts who were chosen in accordance with the same criteria used to select the first group.  The only difference in the procedure was that this time we requested the experts to simply note which words were, in their opinion, emotional, without specifying the character of the word (see Appendix).  This was related to the technological capabilities at that time. 

Results and discussion

Even a cursory glance at the most emotional words indicates that there was a substantial predominance of words with negative connotations. The words “happiness” and “love” only received a rating of 8, whereas among those chosen to be the most emotional were words that were wholly negative in their connotations and that are used to assess or describe severe emotional states, among which such words as “momma” or “baby” were practically lost.   Our expert appraisal differed from previous ones that were carried out by other researchers not in that we proposed somewhat limited sets of words chosen for one or another reason by the researchers, but in that all of the words had the same degree of complexity (they were disyllabic). As a result, an expert superimposes his own individual experience on the experience of a whole people, and it turns out that emotionality is not an abstract idea but is closely connected with a particular physiological reaction to the essence of the word.

It is known that a child is born with a predominantly negative spectrum of emotions, which can be explained from an evolutionary perspective [7]. What is more, a positive emotion quickly loses its intensity, while a negative one can, on the contrary, increase in intensity even as there is distancing in time from an event. The development of all forms of dependent behavior, underlying which is activation of the system that replenishes the basal forebrain, is based upon this. It is the special nature of this system that it constantly increases the intensity of positive stimuli of the same type, and that it increases the variety of beneficial effects [12]. The maturation of an adult’s positive spectrum of emotions is a function of education. This means that the “weight” of putting the positive spectrum of emotional experience into words is predetermined to a great extent by the beneficial impact of a person’s environment and the teaching of how to capture this or that nuance of their inner emotions in words.  It is for this reason that the individual experience of an expert can bring about a substantial shift in a positive direction, which is then lost when it comes up against the time-tested experience of the people.

This kind of expert appraisal covering all the disyllabic nouns in the language, repeated after a twenty-year interval, attests to how objectively emotionality is represented in language and to how it changes based on individual experience in a specific society when there are shifts in that society, forming stereotypes in the manifestations of emotionality within that culture.

An analysis of the words that were evaluated in Expert Appraisal 10 shows that, in terms of emotional coloring, there was virtually no unanimity. In both the first and the second EA, there were only three or four words that were unambiguously rated as having emotional coloring.  At the same time, all four words from the set used in the 2009 EA were on the list of highly emotional words in an expert appraisal done in 1989 (EA 8 to 10). 

By contrast, when we culled out all those words that were appraised at no lower than 6, in the first instance we came up with 164 words and in the second, 150.  This means that, although the composition of the list changes, for a particular selection of words, the intensity of the emotional coloring remains relatively constant.  Out of 4,262 disyllabic Russian words, it was 3.8 percent of them in EA1 and 3.5 percent in EA2.

We had earlier conducted research into the inclusion of a diverse number of emotional words in a list of twenty words and then later assessed how effective duplication of these words had been.  If there was only one emotional word, it almost always recurred.  If the list included more than three emotional words, some of them lost their emotional value.  Duplication of words from the list of neutral words and from the list consisting solely of emotional words was practically identical. This creates the impression that there is some sort of mechanism that regulates the emotional level of incoming information, or, to be more precise, the level of complete activation of the brain when there is incoming information [10].

It can be assumed that the activation level of a specific node in a semantic network is determined not simply by the fan-shaped spread of activation connected with a task that is given to the subject [13] but on the activation level of nearby nodes, which depends on the level of the incoming information.  The network somehow regulates the emotional value of newly arrived information according to the state it is in at the moment it receives an external signal.

Words with defined EA levels were split up in the following way for the two years. In 1989, an EA-5 was given to 175 words, an EA-4 to 276 words, an EA-3 to 516 words, an EA-2 to 704 words, an EA-1 to 999 words, and an EA-0 to 1,321 words.  In 2008, an EA-5 was assigned to 116 words, an EA-4 to 171 words, an EA-3 to 266 words, an EA-2 to 389 words, an EA-1 to 1,003 words, and an EA-0 to 2033 words.

 

Thus, comparing the second appraisal to the first, while for strongly emotional words (with an EA of 6 or more) the correlation of groups of words with a different number of expert choices was virtually identical, for those with a less pronounced emotional coloring there was a substantial difference, and for neutral words, there were almost twice as many of them in 2009 yr. as in 1989yr. (Table 2).

A qualitative analysis of the words disclosed some differences between the two expert appraisals (EAs) done at an interval of twenty years, and they clearly reflected the social circumstances at the time each EA was conducted.

For example, at the end of the 1980s, the word “abortion” was given an EA of 10, but in the second appraisal it was deemed to be emotional by only six of the experts (Table 3). The explanation for its appearance in the 1989 EA is rather obvious:  there were neither birth control pills nor condoms at the time, and abortions were performed WITHOUT the use of anesthetics.  At that time, one of the authors of this article was called upon to advise a 35-year-old woman and mother of three, who had gone through fifteen abortions without the use of anesthesia. The gist of the woman’s request was to somehow find a way to allay the awful fear that overtook her as nighttime approached, for she knew she would be unable to refuse her husband’s wishes (since she was afraid that if she did, he would leave her for another woman), even though she was in terror of yet another abortion.

In the first study, the word “jeans” received an EA of 4, which is to say that it was characterized as an emotional word, whereas twenty years later none of the experts considered it to have any emotional coloring. At the end of the 1980s, imported jeans were hard to come by, and they labeled a person as belonging to an elite group of people. Today jeans of any brand are commercially available to all, and the brand that a person buys depends entirely on that person’s income. This appraisal, analogous to the one performed twenty years earlier, revealed still other important trends. Just like “jeans”, in 1989 “soap” was also an emotional word (when it suddenly vanished from store shelves – accordingly, the collocation “lice infestation” had an EA of 8 at that time), but in the second experiment it was judged to be neutral.

Three words received an EA of 10 in 1989, including the words “fool” and “abortion”. In 2009, when conditions had substantially changed, the word “abortion”, retaining its emotionality, ended up in the category of words with an EA of 6 and was in 78th position. The word “fool”, which had been in first place in 1989, fell to 130th place in 2009, having lost much of its offensive force, so clearly and unambiguously recognized by the experts in the first appraisal.  It was the same story with the word “happiness”, which had been rated at 8 in the 1989 EA, and then, in 2009, stood in 128th place and was given an EA of 6.

The word “love” was given an EA of 8 in the 1989 appraisal, but in 2009 it ended up in the group of words with an EA of 6 and in 138th place (considered to be even less emotional than “fool”).  In 2009, there was not one positively nuanced word with an EA of 9 or 10.  The words “mama” and “tenderness” had an EA of only 8 (Table  4).

Thus, there was not one positive word in either of the appraisals that was recognized clearly and unambiguously as emotional by all ten of the experts, i.e. none of them were given an EA of 10.

In 1989, however, there was one positively nuanced word in the group of words with an EA of 9, and that was “mama”; in the group with an EA of 8, there were two, “happiness” and “love”; among those with an EA of 7, there were four, “sun”, “papa”, “father” and “delight”; in the group with an EA of 6, there were 13, “family”, “humor”, “tenderness”, “success”, “joy”, “flower”, “hi”, “courage”, “freshness”, “goodness”, “wedding”, “luxury” and “friendship”. In the 2008 EA, there were three words that found their way into the group with an EA of 8, “tenderness”, “mama” and “kid”; there were four words that made it into the group with an EA of 7, “spring (the season)”, “friendship”, “caress” and “ecstasy”; and there were ten words that ended up with an EA of 6, “lily-of-the-valley”, “tot”, “delight”, “happiness”, “surprise”, “baby”, “crony”, “love”, “joy” and “miracle”.  So, there were twenty positively nuanced words in EA1 and seventeen in EA2, and they began not with the group having an EA of 9 but with the one having an EA of 8.

An analysis of EA1 makes it possible to take a look at the words that were appraised in an ambiguous way by the experts.  (In EA2, the experts simply put a check mark next to a word they considered to be emotional, instead of a “+” or “-”.) For example, five experts evaluated “money” as having positive connotations, and two, as having negative connotations. In the 2009 EA, this word received an expert appraisal of 3 and ranked 890th on the list. The word “wife” also turned out to be rated ambiguously in EA1: five experts saw it as positive, while two experts considered it to be negative. In the first appraisal, it had an EA of 3 and occupied the 460th place.

It is significant that the words “mama” and “papa” (“father”) were included in different groups in both EAs.  While in 1989 the word “mama” was considered to have emotional value by nine of the experts, and the words “papa” and “father” by seven, in 2009 “mama” received an EA of 8 and “papa” (“father”) only a 4 (Table 5). Inclusion in groups with different EAs attests to how differently experts from different generations viewed the world and, in particular, how differently they judged the significance of parents in real life. Unfortunately, no scale was used in 2009, so there are no statistics as to whether the experts gave these words positive or negative connotations. In EA1, both words clearly and unambiguously had positive connotations.

While in 1989 the word “church” was considered by one of the experts to have negative connotations and by five of them to have positive overtones, by 2009 the word had lost its emotional coloring.

The number of discrepancies in the attribution of one or the other label to a word depends on the number of words in a group.  Thus (Table 6), out of 47 words with an EA of 7 there were seven such dissimilarities between the experts (14.9 percent)  These were with the words “wife”, “hussy”, “philanderer”, “money”, “boredom” and “manure”.  Out of 88 words in the group with an EA of 6, there were discrepancies in connection with sixteen words (18.2 percent); out of 175 words with an EA of 5, there were disagreements connected with 36 words (20.6 percent); out of 273 words with an EA of 4, there were mismatches with 73 words (26.4 percent); out of 516 with an EA of 3, there were variations in 186 (36.1 percent); and out of 704 with an EA of 2, there were 210 deviations (29.6 percent).

Thus, a comparative analysis of these two EAs allows us to come to this conclusion:  social and cultural factors play an essential role in a person’s decision to attribute emotional significance to any particular word.

Our findings show that when a person considers the emotional significance of a word, they do not take into account the word itself but rather the stream of emotionally charged words incoming at that moment.

Moreover, changes in the intensity of the emotionality attributed to that word are possible at a particular moment in time.

The findings of an expert appraisal can be used to put together lists of words such that the words in any list are clearly coded.

 

Table 1. The galvanic skin responses for marked and nonmarked words

type of words

parameters

skin-galvanic reflex (mcV)

Marked

1900

Nonmarked

1500

 

Table 2. The number of words with one EA from 4,262 disyllabic Russian words

Rate

EA 1989

EA 2008

10-6

164

150

5

175

116

4

276

171

3

516

266

2

704

389

1

999

1,003

0

1,321

2,033

 

Table 3. The rate of the word “abortion” in two EA

EA 1989

EA 2008

10

6

 

 

Table 4. The rates of some emotional words in different EAs

Rate

EA 1989

EA 2009

9

1 mamma

 

8

2 “happiness” and “love”

3 “tenderness”, “mama”, “kid”

7

4 “sun”, “papa”, “father” and “delight”

4“spring (the season)”, “friendship”, “caress” and “ecstasy

6

13 “family”, “humor”, “tenderness”, “success”, “joy”, “flower”, “hi”, “courage”, “freshness”, “goodness”, “wedding”, “luxury” and “friendship”

10“lily-of-the-valley”, “tot”, “delight”, “happiness”, “surprise”, “baby”, “crony”, “love”, “joy” and “miracle”.

 

Table 5. Comparative rates word “mamma” and “papa”

EA

Mamma

papa (father)

EA 1989

9

7

EA 2009

8

4

 

Table 6. The number of discrepancies in EAs

Rate

№words

% discrepancies

7

47

14.9

6

88

18.2

5

175

20.6

4

273

26.4

3

516

36.1

2

704

29.6

 

 

Appendix

Type of EA

Expert appraisal

1989

2009

EA 10

гнусность, аборт, дурак infamy, abortion, stupid

сука, харя, быдло, хамство

bitch, mug, cattle, rudeness

EA 9

грубость, ужас, сплетня,  гнойник, холуй, рвота, инфаркт, сука, быдло, хамье, мама

brutality, horror, gossip, ulcer, lackey, vomiting, heart attack, bitch, redneck, hame, mother

бойня, стерва, гнида, гнилье

slaughter, bitch, worm, rot

EA8

вшивость, харя, садист, злоба, свинья, хандра, злодей, чума, плевок, расстрел, гадость, болезнь, любовь, счастье

lice, mug, sadistic malice, the pig, the spleen, the villain, plague, spit, shot, disgusting, disease, love, happiness

болезнь, бомба, гибель, невроз, расстрел, трусость, цинизм, бабник, бездарь, брехня, ведьма, гадость, гнусность, детка, злюка, мама, наглость, нахал, нацизм, нежность, погань, рвота, фашизм, шалун

disease, bomb, death, neurosis, shooting, cowardice, cynicism, a womanizer, mediocrity, lies, the witch, filth, vileness, baby, angry, mom, arrogance, arrogant Nazism, tenderness, trash, vomiting, fascism, naughty

 

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