Valence

Emotional words are assumed to have a processing advantage over neutral words due to their emotional content. Meanwhile, this advantage depends on other word features such as frequency and the characteristics of the processor and context of learning. Accordingly, the current study investigated the simultaneous impacts of L2 words’ emotional valence and frequency, and L2 user’s gender on word recognition time in a natural reading context. 43 intermediate EFL learners read 36 sentences in a coherent text for comprehension while their eye movements were recorded by eye-tracker. The findings revealed that participants processed the positive, negative, and neutral words identically based on eye fixation time. However, the frequency effect was attained for both valenced and neutral words. Also, no significant gender differences were approved in terms of recognition time though male participants tended to process all word types slightly faster than female ones. The lack of processing difference between valenced and neutral words is attributed to the disembodiment of L2 emotional words and learning experience of the participants as late EFL learners. These learners have been deprived of affective socialization and the affective sensory experience in their development of L2 emotional words. The absence of valence/frequency interaction is attributed to the L1/L2 relationship in terms of the target words. Although witnessed gender effect did not reach a significance level, it is suggested that the processing of emotional words be viewed in a multidimensional framework where the characteristics of the word, the processor, and the learning context are taken into account

Aims: The present study aimed to validate the Persian Emoji Lexicon (PEL) and examine gender and cultural differences in the perception of the affective properties of selected emojis. Method: The study consisted of two phases: emoji selection and an online survey. First, we identified the 109 most frequently used emojis on Twitter. In the second phase, we assessed emotion and valence ratings from a sample of 200 X users (140 females; 27.3 ± 3.5 years). Results: Of the 109 selected emojis, 90 were perceived as having a positive valence. Gender comparisons revealed that women rated significantly higher emotional intensity across all eight emotion dimensions compared to men. We also compared our findings with a similar database validated among Canadians. The inter-rater reliability for emoji valence ratings between Iranian and Canadian participants showed a fair level of agreement (Kappa coefficient = 0.357), while also highlighting significant cultural differences in emotion perception. Conclusion: This database serves as a valuable resource for sentiment analysis of social media texts containing emojis, as well as for practical applications where emojis function as emotional cues to influence behavior (e.g., in marketing and education).