IDEST: International Database of Emotional Short Texts

Johanna K Kaakinen; Egon Werlen; Yvonne Kammerer; Cengiz Acartürk; Xavier Aparicio; Thierry Baccino; Ugo Ballenghein; Per Bergamin; Núria Castells; Armanda Costa; Isabel Falé; Olga Mégalakaki; Susana Ruiz Fernández

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0274480

IDEST: International Database of Emotional Short Texts

PLoS One. 2022 Oct 7;17(10):e0274480. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0274480. eCollection 2022.

Authors

Johanna K Kaakinen^{1

2}, Egon Werlen³, Yvonne Kammerer^{4

5}, Cengiz Acartürk^{6

7}, Xavier Aparicio⁸, Thierry Baccino⁹, Ugo Ballenghein^{8

9}, Per Bergamin³, Núria Castells¹⁰, Armanda Costa¹¹, Isabel Falé^{11

12}, Olga Mégalakaki^{13

14}, Susana Ruiz Fernández^{4

15}

Affiliations

¹ Department of Psychology and Speech-Language Pathology, University of Turku, Turku, Finland.
² INVEST Research Flagship, University of Turku, Turku, Finland.
³ Institute for Research in Open, Distance and eLearning, Swiss Distance University of Applied Sciences, Brig, Switzerland.
⁴ Leibniz-Institut für Wissensmedien, Tübingen, Germany.
⁵ Stuttgart Media University, Stuttgart, Germany.
⁶ Cognitive Science Department, Jagiellonian University, Kraków, Poland.
⁷ Cognitive Science Department, Middle East Technical University, Ankara, Turkey.
⁸ Université Paris Est Créteil, Bonneuil, France.
⁹ Université Paris 8, Saint-Denis, France.
¹⁰ Universitat de Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain.
¹¹ Center of Linguistics, School of Arts and Humanities, University of Lisbon, Lisbon, Portugal.
¹² Universidade Aberta, Lisbon, Portugal.
¹³ Université de Picardie Jules Verne, Amiens, France.
¹⁴ Sigmund Freud University, Paris, France.
¹⁵ FOM University of Applied Sciences, Essen, Germany.

Abstract

We introduce a database (IDEST) of 250 short stories rated for valence, arousal, and comprehensibility in two languages. The texts, with a narrative structure telling a story in the first person and controlled for length, were originally written in six different languages (Finnish, French, German, Portuguese, Spanish, and Turkish), and rated for arousal, valence, and comprehensibility in the original language. The stories were translated into English, and the same ratings for the English translations were collected via an internet survey tool (N = 573). In addition to the rating data, we also report readability indexes for the original and English texts. The texts have been categorized into different story types based on their emotional arc. The texts score high on comprehensibility and represent a wide range of emotional valence and arousal levels. The comparative analysis of the ratings of the original texts and English translations showed that valence ratings were very similar across languages, whereas correlations between the two pairs of language versions for arousal and comprehensibility were modest. Comprehensibility ratings correlated with only some of the readability indexes. The database is published in osf.io/9tga3, and it is freely available for academic research.

Publication types

Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

Arousal
Emotions*
Humans
Language*
Translating
Translations

Grants and funding

This project was conducted as a part of E-READ COST action (IS1404). The first author received project funding from the Academy of Finland (decision number 334266). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.