Pleasure and Activation Revisited: Dimensions Underlying Semantic Responses to Fifty Randomly Selected “Emotional” Words

49 subjects rated 50 words of affect randomly selected from a dictionary. Factor analyses of the 11 scales used documented the presence of a Pleasure factor and an Activation factor that jointly explained 86% of the variance. With the addition of Personal-ness as a third factor, 92.6% of the variance in mean ratings could be accounted for, and 5 clear clusters of words emerged.