Self-referent depressive adjectives and neutral-content adjectives in Spanish: Norms of emotionality and subjective frequency of use

Abstract

The aim of this study was to provide an empirically-based database of positive and negative adjectives both related to the depressive’s self-schema but not related to anxiety. For all the selected words we provide norms on their emotionality and subjective frequency of use. In our study we have also addressed the distinction, quite often ignored, between trait-depression vs. state-depression and we show the results for words related to both constructs. The procedure to select words was to get partial correlations between the degree of self-description that subjects rated for a list of 159 DSM-IV-based adjectives related to depression and subjects’ own scores on the Beck Depression Inventory (BDI) and the Beck Anxiety Inventory (BAI). Thus, we obtained a final set of 71 negative adjectives significantly related to the trait- or state-depression and 52 positive ones related to the trait- or state-depression. Furthermore, we also selected 86 emotionally neutral adjectives, for which we offer norms of both emotionality and use, to be used as control words in experimental tasks. We finally discuss the implications that these databases of stimuli may have for the advancement of clinical psychology.