In this study, we compared affective ratings of emotional valence and arousal for 882 Serbian words at three points in time: before the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic (2018), during the COVID-19 lockdown (2020), and after the government measures were abandoned (2022). We did not observe a significant change in average valence or arousal ratings across time points. A more detailed look into the data revealed the change in arousal that was different across the valence values. An increase in their linear correlations and a decrease in the nonlinearity of the GAMM smooth demonstrated that, upon the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, emotionally negative words elicited higher arousal ratings, whereas emotionally positive words elicited lower arousal ratings. It revealed that our participants became more sensitive to the negative content and less sensitive to the positive content. Our results add to the findings, which showed that the relationship between emotional valence and arousal is a function of contextual factors, which primarily influence the arousal of words.

在这项研究中，我们比较了 882 个塞尔维亚语单词在三个时间点的情感效价和唤醒度的情感评级：COVID-19 大流行爆发之前（2018 年）、COVID-19 封锁期间（2020 年）和政府封锁之后措施被放弃（2022 年）。我们没有观察到不同时间点的平均效价或唤醒等级有显着变化。对数据进行更详细的研究揭示了不同价态的唤醒变化是不同的。线性相关性的增加和 GAMM 平滑度非线性的降低表明，在 COVID-19 大流行爆发时，情绪消极的单词会引起较高的唤醒评级，而情绪积极的单词会引起较低的唤醒评级。结果表明，我们的参与者对负面内容变得更加敏感，而对正面内容则不太敏感。我们的结果补充了研究结果，表明情绪效价和唤醒之间的关系是上下文因素的函数，而上下文因素主要影响单词的唤醒。