EFFECTS OF EMOTION ON WORD CHOICE AND OVERSPECIFICATION IN
REFERRING EXPRESSIONS
Patrick Vonk, Martijn Goudbeek & Emiel Krahmer (Tilburg University)
Email: [email protected]
Several studies have found that emotion affects the prosodic aspects of language production
(Banse & Scherer, 1996; Scherer, Banse, & Wallbott, 2001; Trainor, Austin, & Desjardins,
2000). However, despite multiple studies investigating referring expressions (Koolen, Gatt,
Goudbeek, & Krahmer, 2011; van Deemter, Gatt, Sluis, & Power, 2012; Vogels, Krahmer, &
Maes, 2013), few have analysed whether emotion also affects syntax and word choice. One
of the few studies on this matter (Kempe, Rookes, & Swarbrigg, 2013), revealed that a
positive emotion such as happiness, could increase ambiguity in participants' referring
expressions. For instance, happy participants frequently referred to an object in a picture as
"the bat" (flying mammal), even though there was also a baseball bat in the same picture,
making it impossible for (imaginary) listeners to know for certain which of the two 'bats' was
meant. The authors hypothesised that this increase in ambiguity could be due to the happy
participants' difficulty to look at the picture from the listener's perspective. Interesting as this
result is, many questions remain. Therefore, the current study aims to offer more insight into
the influence of emotions on referring expressions.
First of all, we investigated whether emotional state influenced the use of emotion
words compared to non-emotion words (I.e., do speakers use more emotion words in their
descriptions if they are emotional?). Additionally, we analysed if emotions influenced
emotional congruency (I.e., are the emotion words that speakers use related to their
emotion?). Lastly, we investigated if emotions influenced the degree of overspecification
(I.e., do speakers use more properties, emotional or otherwise, in their descriptions when
they are emotional?). This was done by dividing 60 participants over 3 emotion groups (sad,
happy, and neutral). At the beginning and halfway through the experiment, each group
watched a 7 minute movie excerpt that was meant to elicit an emotional state. We chose to
elicit an emotion twice to counter emotional dissipation during the course of the experiment.
The manipulation of emotions (measured on a 7-point Likert scale) appeared to be equally
successful on both occasions (mean scores: happy = 5.95, sad = 2.68, neutral = 4.38). After
each movie excerpt, participants produced 20 referring expressions (5 of them referring to
filler items) during a director-matcher task. A target item (see Figure 1) could always be
distinguished from the other items by referring to its emotional state ("The happy man") or an
external attribute ("The man with the glasses").
Figure 1. Example of director-matcher task that was used in the experiment.
Participants have to refer to the stimulus with the red arrow.
Our first hypothesis, based on Bower (1981), was that emotional participants are
more likely to use emotionally charged words ('laughing', 'crying', 'happy', 'sad' etc.) in their
referring expressions than emotionally neutral participants. The second hypothesis, based
on Niedenthal and Setterlund (1994), was that there would be emotional congruency for
emotional participants, meaning that happy participants are more likely to mention positive
emotions, and sad participants are more likely to mention negative emotions. Our third
hypothesis was that sad participants are less likely to overspecify in their referring
expressions than happy and neutral participants. This is based on the notion that negative
emotion leads to deeper information processing (Pham, 2007), which in turn leads to more
accurate/shorter referring expressions.
The results showed that emotional participants are indeed more likely than
emotionally neutral participants to use emotionally charged words (see Figure 2). Happy
participants differ significantly from neutral participants (p = .003), and while not significant,
the difference between sad and neutral participants is too salient to ignore (p = .058). This
supports the first hypothesis. However, no support was found for the second hypothesis:
happy participants were not significantly more likely to mention positive emotion words, and
sad participants were not more likely to mention negative emotion words. As for the third
hypothesis, no support was found either: sad participants did not overspecify significantly
less than happy and neutral participants. In conclusion, taking the support for the first
hypothesis into account, this study suggests an effect of emotion on word choice in referring
expressions. Therefore, we aim to investigate this issue further in subsequent studies.
Figure 2. Median proportion of emotion words used per emotional condition.
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