Exemplars of concepts vary in their degree of prototypicality. This is also true for emotion concepts. This study presents prototypicality ratings for a large set of Chinese words. The database contains 636 potential Chinese emotion words (i.e., words that directly express particular emotions, like “高兴 happy” and “哀愁 sad”), from different grammatical categories. Native Chinese speakers rated the words in terms of emotional prototypicality. The database also contains values for valence, arousal, and emotionality. The analyses of the ratings revealed that 502 out of 636 words had a high prototypicality value (value equal to or above three on a 1-to-5 scale), the most prototypical words being negative and high-arousal words. The analyses also indicated that the emotional prototypicality of a word was positively related to both arousal and emotionality, and negatively related to valence. Among these variables, arousal was the most important contributor. Similar results have been found in studies conducted in other languages. This will be a useful resource for researchers interested in studying emotion words in the Chinese language and for those interested in cross-linguistic comparisons.

概念范例的原型程度各不相同。对于情感概念也是如此。这项研究提出了一大组中文单词的原型性评级。该数据库包含636个潜在的中文情感词（即直接表达特定情感的词，如“高兴happy ”和“哀愁sad ”），来自不同的语法类别。以中文为母语的人根据情感原型来评价这些词。该数据库还包含效价、唤醒度和情绪的值。评级分析显示，636 个单词中的 502 个具有较高的原型值（在 1 到 5 的范围内，值等于或高于 3），其中最具原型性的单词是负面单词和高唤醒单词。分析还表明，单词的情感原型与唤醒度和情绪性呈正相关，与效价呈负相关。在这些变量中，唤醒是最重要的因素。用其他语言进行的研究也发现了类似的结果。对于有兴趣研究中文情感词的研究人员和有兴趣进行跨语言比较的研究人员来说，这将是一个有用的资源。