psychNorms

A systematically-derived metabase of 291 psychological word norms, obtained for the sake of interpretability analyses in the following paper (please cite if you use the data):

@misc{hussain2024probingcontentssemanticrepresentations,
      title={Probing the contents of semantic representations from text, behavior, and brain data using the psychNorms metabase}, 
      author={Zak Hussain and Rui Mata and Ben R. Newell and Dirk U. Wulff},
      year={2024},
      eprint={2412.04936},
      archivePrefix={arXiv},
      primaryClass={cs.CL},
      url={https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.04936}, 
}

The metabase was developed through a systematic literature search for psychological word norms. A total of 3,056 Web of Science articles matching the query ((word OR words) NEAR/10 (norm OR norms)) OR ((word OR words) NEAR/10 (rating OR ratings)) were screened in multiple rounds to identify primary data containing human-rated (behavioral) word properties in English. Following several rounds of screening, the results were combined with various psychological norms from the South Carolina Psycholinguistic Metabases (SCOPE) and a dataset of 65 human-rated experiential attributes. The final metabase contains 291 norms, 128 of which are the unique result of the systematic literature search. The search returned 173 norms, 45 of which also exist in SCOPE.

Source	# Norms	# Ratings
Literature search	174	909,660
SCOPE	98	2,676,484
Experiential attributes	65	34,532
Total (unique)	291	2,856,409

It should be noted that we draw on the publicly available version of SCOPE, which contains ratings for a reduced set of (higher frequency) words to limit the size of the dataset for practical, data sharing reasons. This mainly impacts the more objective (non-human rated) norms in the metabase (e.g., frequency, part of speech), which contain a higher proportion of lower frequency words.

Norms were manually grouped into 27 categories, which are listed below along with the number of norms and ratings in each category:

Category	# Norms	# Ratings
Age of Acquisition	16	73,084
Animacy	14	11,689
Arousal	9	43,053
Associatability	3	1,546
Auditory Lexical Decision	4	73,459
Concreteness	6	45,707
Dominance	3	37,834
Emotion	31	155,246
Familiarity	22	130,592
Frequency	10	596,385
Goals/Needs	3	2,128
Iconicity/Transparency	4	19,035
Imageability	14	18,713
Motor	16	239,976
Naming	2	80,960
Number of Features	1	4,381
Part of Speech	2	118,999
Recognition Memory	1	4,743
Semantic Decision	10	32,631
Semantic Diversity	11	444,598
Semantic Neighborhood	7	153,554
Sensory	36	207,538
Social/Moral	16	25,841
Space/Time/Quantity	25	18,096
This/That	1	535
Valence	18	54,052
Visual Lexical Decision	6	262,034
Total	291	2,856,409

The metabase is composed of two files:

• psychNorms.zip: Contains 291 psychological norms (columns) at the word level (rows).
• psychNorms_metadata.csv: Contains metadata for each of the norms in psychNorms.csv, with the following columns:
  • norm: Name of the norm.
  • description: Description of the norm.
  • citation: Original source of the norm.
  • category: High-level category for the norm.
  • source: (Meta-)Source of the norm (lit_search, SCOPE, experiential_attributes, or some combination, e.g., SCOPE & lit_search).