Phonoemotional profiling: a description of the emotional flavour of English texts on the basis of the phonemes employed in them

Research employing three large lists of words rated along emotional dimensions (total N = 15,761 words) supported a prior claim that most phonemes have a distinct emotional character. Different phonemes tended to occur more often in different types of emotional words. When phonemes were grouped along eight radii in a two dimensional emotional space defined by Pleasantness and Activation (Pleasantness, Cheeriness, Activation, Nastiness, Unpleasantness, Sadness, Passivity, and Softness), it became possible to draw profiles of texts in terms of their preferential use of different classes of phonemes. Four experiments were performed to illustrate the manner in which phonemes in nonsense words are related to emotion, and evidence of the validity of character assignments was investigated and received support in three further analyses. The emotionality of phonemes was related to both place and manner of articulation and to properties of the auditory signal itself. Phonoemotional profiles were drawn for several types of material and provided supporting evidence for the validity of the assignment of emotional character to phonemes.