Thickness Is More Than Affective Valence
Evaluative Language Through the Lenses of Psycholinguistics
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 7150323 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Giovanni Cassani (0000-0003-3917-3315, Department of Computational Cognitive Science Tilburg University, corresponding author), Matteo Colombo (0000-0002-2251-2248, Department of Philosophy Tilburg University) |
| Year | 2026 |
| Volume | 50 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Pages | e70180-e70180 |
| Publication date | 2026-02-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Cognitive Science (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0364-0213 • E-ISSN: 1551-6709 |
| Publisher | Wiley (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1111/cogs.70180 |
| PMID | 41622771 |
| OpenAlex | W7127045330 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 73 |
Thick terms like “courageous,” “smart,” and “tasty” combine description and evaluation, contrasting with purely evaluative terms like “good” and “bad,” and descriptive terms like “Italian” and “green.” Thick terms intuitively constitute a special class of evaluative language; but we currently do not know whether the psycholinguistic effects of these terms are reducible to known semantic dimensions. Here, we start to systematically explore this question by comparing the behavior of thick terms and non‐thick descriptive terms with similar affective valence, which is a strong candidate semantic dimension to account for differences between evaluative and non‐evaluative language. We study thick terms from English, Dutch, and Italian, combining behavioral data from the cancellability task, Cloze task, and free association networks, with natural language processing methods and psycholinguistic ratings of word valence. We find that thick and non‐thick descriptive terms are associated with different psycholinguistic effects, even when carefully matched for valence, suggesting that valence is insufficient to account for the difference between thick and non‐thick terms. Instead, we find no reliable difference between positive and negative thick terms, and between moral, epistemic, and aesthetic thick terms. Our findings indicate that thick terms form a homogeneous class of evaluative language whose psycholingusitic effects cannot be explained only in terms of affective valence
Cognition · Homogeneous · Psycholinguistics · Semantic differential · Categorization, perception, and language · Language, Metaphor, and Cognition · Neurobiology of Language and Bilingualism
Slurs and Thick Terms
Emotions, Values, and Agency
Ruling Passions
A framework for studying the neurobiology of value-based decision making
Explaining human performance in psycholinguistic tasks with models of semantic similarity based on prediction and counting
Sentiment and Value
Vector-Space Models of Semantic Representation From a Cognitive Perspective
The “Small World of Words” English word association norms for over 12,000 cue words
Moral Judgments
Emotion words, regardless of polarity, have a processing advantage over neutral words
“Cloze Procedure”
Norms of valence, arousal, and dominance for 13,915 English lemmas
WordNet
How (and where) does moral judgment work?
Neural correlates of written emotion word processing
The pollyanna hypothesis
Emotion and language
Topics in semantic representation.
A solution to Plato's problem
Producing high-dimensional semantic spaces from lexical co-occurrence
Measuring aesthetic emotions
Emotion, Cognition, and Behavior
Mood as Information
Reflection and Reasoning in Moral Judgment
Logic and Conversation
An fMRI Investigation of Emotional Engagement in Moral Judgment
Mixed-effects modeling with crossed random effects for subjects and items
Tracing thick and thin concepts through corpora
The polarity effect of evaluative language
Automatic vigilance for negative words is categorical and general
The Lewd, the Rude and the Nasty
The 385+ million word Corpus of Contemporary American English (1990-2008+)
Distributional Memory
Thick Concepts and the Moral Brain
Distributional Structure
The cancellability test for conversational implicatures
Thick Concepts and Sociological Research
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |