Małgorzata Wierzba

Nencki Institute of Experimental Biology | NENCKI

The Nencki Affective Word List (NAWL) has recently been introduced as a standardized database of Polish words suitable for studying various aspects of language and emotions. Though the NAWL was originally based on the most commonly used dimensional approach, it is not the only way of studying emotions. Another framework is based on discrete emotion...

Research on the processing of sexual stimuli has proved that such material has high priority in human cognition. Yet, although sex differences in response to sexual stimuli were extensively discussed in the literature, sexual orientation was given relatively little consideration, and material suitable for relevant research is difficult to come by....

Emotion lexicons are useful in research across various disciplines, but the availability of such resources remains limited for most languages. While existing emotion lexicons typically comprise words, it is a particular meaning of a word (rather than the word itself) that conveys emotion. To mitigate this issue, we present the Emotion Meanings data...

Large-scale datasets present unique opportunities to perform scientific investigations with unprecedented breadth. However, they also pose considerable challenges for the findability, accessibility, interoperability, and reusability (FAIR) of research outcomes due to infrastructure limitations, data usage constraints, or software license restrictio...

It is now widely accepted that we are in a climate emergency, and the number of people who are concerned about this problem is growing. Yet, qualitative, in-depth studies to investigate the emotional response to climate change were conducted either in high-income, western countries, or in low-income countries particularly vulnerable to climate chan...

Climate change is widely recognized as an urgent issue, and the number of people concerned about it is increasing. While emotions are among the strongest predictors of behaviour change in the face of climate change, researchers have only recently begun to investigate this topic experimentally. This may be due to the lack of standardised, validated...

There is a growing research interest in the affective aspects of climate change and their links with pro-climate engagement as well as with health and wellbeing. Yet, psychometrically valid instruments assessing the wide panorama of climate change emotions are limited. Here, we report on the development and validation of the Inventory of Climate Em...

Background Compulsive Sexual Behavior Disorder (CSBD) was recently included in ICD-11 as a new impulse control disorder. While this certainly improved the diagnosis of CSBD, the underlying brain mechanisms of the disorder are still poorly understood. Better description of brain functional deficits is required. Aim Here we investigate patterns of r...

In this article we present extended results obtained on the multidomain dataset of Polish text reviews collected within the Sentimenti project. We present preliminary results of classification models trained and tested on 7,000 texts annotated by over 20,000 individuals using valence, arousal, and eight basic emotions from Plutchik’s model. Additio...

Previous behavioural and neuroimaging studies have consistently reported that memory is enhanced for associations congruent or incongruent with the structure of prior knowledge, termed as schemas. However, it remains unclear if similar effects arise with emotion-related associations, and whether they depend on the type of emotions. Here, we address...

Current models of episodic memory posit that retrieval involves the reenactment of encoding processes. Recent evidence has shown that this reinstatement process – indexed by subsequent encoding-retrieval similarity of brain activity patterns - is related to the activity in the hippocampus during encoding. However, we tend to re-experience emotional...

Large-scale datasets present unique opportunities to perform scientific investigations with unprecedented breadth. However, they also pose considerable challenges for the findability, accessibility, interoperability, and reusability (FAIR) of research outcomes due to infrastructure limitations, data usage constraints, or software license restrictio...

Presentation for the article: Propagation of emotions, arousal and polarity in WordNet using Heterogeneous Structured Synset Embeddings

Objective Attention Training Technique (ATT) is a key therapeutic tool in metacognitive therapy. There are numerous studies on the behavioral effects of ATT, however the neural mechanisms at work in the training are yet to be uncovered. To date there have been no controlled fMRI studies of ATT. Method We conducted a randomized double-blind control...

In this paper we present a novel method for emotive propagation in a wordnet based on a large emotive seed. We introduce a sense-level emotive lexicon annotated with polarity, arousal and emotions. The data were annotated as a part of a large study involving over 20,000 participants. A total of 30,000 lexical units in Polish WordNet were described...

In this article, we present a novel multidomain dataset of Polish text reviews. The data were annotated as part of a large study involving over 20,000 participants. A total of 7,000 texts were described with metadata, each text received about 25 annotations concerning polarity, arousal and eight basic emotions, marked on a multilevel scale. We pres...

It is widely accepted that people differ in memory performance. The ability to control one's memory depends on multiple factors, including the emotional properties of the memorized material. While it was widely demonstrated that emotion can facilitate memory, it is unclear how emotion modifies our ability to suppress memory. One of the reasons for...

Introduction: Sexual arousability is defined as an ability to react with sexual arousal in response to external and internal stimuli. Sexual arousablity measuring is important for research purposes and for diagnostics of sexual dysfunctions. Self-Assessment techniques can be used for such measurement. Due to absence of Polish-language psychometric...

Emotion influences various cognitive processes, such as memory. This beneficial or detrimental effect can be studied with verbal material, yet in this case a broad term of context needs to be taken into account. The present work reviews recent literature and proposes that traditional differentiation between semantic and environmental context should...

The Nencki Affective Picture System (NAPS; Marchewka, Żurawski, Jednoróg, & Grabowska, Behavior Research Methods, 2014) is a standardized set of 1,356 realistic, high-quality photographs divided into five categories (people, faces, animals, objects, and landscapes). NAPS has been primarily standardized along the affective dimensions of valence, aro...

In the present article, we introduce the Nencki Affective Word List (NAWL), created in order to provide researchers with a database of 2,902 Polish words, including nouns, verbs, and adjectives, with ratings of emotional valence, arousal, and imageability. Measures of several objective psycholinguistic features of the words (frequency, grammatical...