ABSTRACT The interplay between emotion and language has drawn increasing attention from researchers in various fields, such as psycholinguistics, neurolinguistics, and artificial intelligence. The classification of emotional words is crucial to experimental studies, as it serves as a fundamental step for unveiling the complex relationship between emotion and language. Hence, the current study introduces affective and psycholinguistic norms for 1200 two‐character Chinese words. The affective variables, including emotional prototypicality (EmoPro), valence, and arousal, as well as psycholinguistic variables (abstractness and familiarity), were rated by native speakers of Chinese using a 7‐point Likert scale. This set of norms, as far as we know, is the first one that provides words’ EmoPro together with other affective and psycholinguistic variables rated by the same group of participants. The results of inter‐rater reliability and correlation tests showed that this set of norms had good reliability and validity. The correlation between EmoPro and arousal was significant and strong. Valence and arousal exhibited an asymmetric U‐shaped relationship, with negative words being rated higher in arousal than positive ones. We also identified a quadratic relationship between EmoPro and valence, indicating that more prototypical emotion‐label words tend to trigger more extreme valence ratings. EmoPro significantly and positively correlated with abstractness, indicating that prototypical emotion‐label words tend to be more abstract. In addition, familiarity and word frequency predict lexical decision performance, whereas EmoPro does not after controlling for other variables. The present set of Chinese norms supports material selection in experimental research, enables cross‐linguistic comparisons, and has potential applications in natural language processing.
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