article_snippet.sent: The emotional potential of words is rated in terms of valence and arousal ratings.
article_snippet.sent: Valence refers to how positive or negative a word is, while arousal refers to its 'physiological intensity', or the extent to which its affects the reader and their view of the word or text.
article_snippet.sent: These properties are normally used for words in isolation, which can be categorised as negative, neutral, and positive.
article_snippet.sent: But the researchers from Lancaster University wanted to see how these classifications and findings for individual words could be applied to passages of text and books as a whole. '
article_snippet.sent: A text is more than a list of words, and the way these words are combined, or the context these words are embedded in, clearly matter,' explained the researchers from Lancaster University.
article_snippet.sent: In each case, the emotional connotations of the passages were at the start and and the emotional contents were unambiguous and consistent throughout the passage.
article_snippet.sent: The more emotionally arousing words a text contained, the more it was judged to be emotionally affecting.
article_snippet.sent: from the Half-Blood Prince was said to contain words that are consistently negative in valence and high in arousal.
article_snippet.sent: Thus, the researchers said the emotional engagement readers show is mostly driven by the single emotional words contained in the text, rather than by each passage as a whole.
article_snippet.sent: Psychologist Dr Francesca Citron from the university said: 'These results suggest that a text's constituting words can predict its emotion potential.'
article_snippet.sent: 'When we read a text, specific words reverberate in we minds beyond the more complex message conveyed by a text; the art of choosing the right words with the appropriate affective impact is part of what defines the skill of good writers or speakers.'
article_snippet.sent: The study: 'The emotion potential of words and passages in reading Harry Potter –