Introduction: The Affective Norms for English Words (ANEW) is being developed to provide a set of normative emotional ratings for a large number of words in the English language. The goal is to develop a set of verbal materials that have been rated in terms of pleasure, arousal, and dominance to complement the existing International Affective Picture System (IAPS, Lang, Bradley, {\&} Cuthbert, 1999) and International Affective Digitized Sounds (IADS; Bradley {\&} Lang, 1999), which are collections of picture and sound stimuli, respectively, that also include these affective ratings. The ANEW, IAPS, and IADS are being developed and distributed by NIMH Center for Emotion and Attention (CSEA) investigators Margaret Bradley and Peter Lang, in order to provide standardized materials that are available to researchers in the study of emotion and attention. The existence of these affective collections should help in comparing results across different investigations of emotion, as well as in allowing replication within and across research labs assessing basic or applied problems in the study of emotion.
The goal is to develop a set of verbal materials that have been rated in terms of pleasure, arousal, and dominance