Likeableness and meaningfulness ratings of 555 (+487) person-descriptive words

The present study renorms and expands upon a list of person descriptive words originally compiled by Anderson (1968). Anderson observed that person descriptive words had a bimodal and slightly negative distribution. Averill (1980) localized this negativity to emotion words, finding no difference for non-emotional words. Likeability ratings observed in the original study and the present study were highly correlated. Despite these similarities, significant differences in likability were observed across a large proportion of words. There was some evidence that words describing emotions and temporary states were unusually negative suggesting that either negative behavior is categorized differently or that the granularity of negative behavior differs across kinds of person descriptive words.