Unraveling fear by using affective norms

The purpose of this research is to study idioms used in Albanian language and the way how they express the emotion of fear. In different cultures, the expression of strong emotions has special features. In the Albanian language, the emotion of fear is expressed more often through idioms. Most of the psychological and neuroscientific research on the relationship between language and emotion has been centered on literal language, despite the pervasiveness of nonliteral expressions in everyday communication. This study provides affective and psycholinguistic norms for 40 Albanian idiomatic expressions and explores the relationships between fear and psycholinguistic idiom properties. Albanian native speakers rated each idiom for emotional valence, knowledge, familiarity, age of acquisition, semantic transparency and ambiguity. The idiomatic meaning and the default idiom structure are stored in long-term semantic memory together with word meanings, concepts and many other types of multiword strings. They also described the figurative meaning of each idiom, and rated how confident they were on the attributed meaning. Results showed that idioms rated high in emotional valence were also rated high in semantic transparency. Knowledge is correlated positively with age of acquisitions and semantic transparency. Idioms without a literal counterpart were rated as more emotionally valenced than idioms with a literal counterpart. Although the meaning of ambiguous idioms was less correctly defined than that of unambiguous idioms, ambiguous idioms were rated as more concrete than unambiguous ones. This suggests that idioms may convey a more direct reference to sensory representations, mediated by the meaning of their constituting words.