MATTER is a new database composed by 540 pictures depicting disgusting, fearful, neutral, erotic, mirthful and incongruent contents. It provides normative values in valence and arousal dimensions, as well as in discrete affective (disgust, fearf, erotica and mirth) and cognitive (incongruence and interest) features for the overall sample and for females and males, separately. Moreover, a tentative classification into discrete categories following several empirical methods is presented (i.e., disgust, fear, mirth, incongruence, erotica, neutral, blended, undifferentiated images), and physical properties of each picture are reported (i.e., luminance, contrast, mean channel values in color space, spatial frequency and picture size).
Our findings suggest that MATTER constitutes a modern and suitable set of affective images including for first time both mirth and incongruence related pictures. Additionally, it will allow the examination of affective and cognitive processes in fear/disgust and humor/incongruence fields. The rationale for including these specific new categories is that mirth-evoking pictures have not been included in any prior databases although humor research is an emerging area within positive psychology that claim for validated instruments for its scientific study. Incongruent but not comical pictures will help designing new experiments that would allow testing the incongruity theory acting as control for the cognitive component of mirth.
The MATTER database comprises 540 images selected according to the author’s criteria in such a way that six categories were equally represented: disgust, fear, mirth, incongruence, erotica and neutral (90 pictures per category).
All the mirthful and the incongruent pictures were selected from freely available online photography stocks in the web (N = 244), and the rest of images were chosen from other existing sets, such as the IAPS (N = 96), NAPS (N = 75), EmoMadrid (N = 91), SFIP (N =18) or GAPED (N = 16). Text and comments included in some of the pictures selected from internet were removed, and all pictures were resized to a 1024 x 768 pixels size. The stimuli from IAPS, NAPS, EmoMadrid, and GAPED are available from the original authors. The rest of the stimuli included in MATTER can be localized on request to the corresponding author for research and noncommercial use.
You can find information about the complete list of MATTER pictures by clicking at the “Internet Pictures” tab included in the Menu.
Table S1 contains Mean and standard deviation for the ratings in valence, arousal, disgust, fear, mirth, erotica, interest and incongruence for each individual picture from the overall sample and for females and males separately, as well as a tentative classification of all MATTER pictures into discrete emotional categories.
It also contains data on the luminance, contrast, mean channel values in CIE 1976 L*a*b color space, spatial frequency in nine different bands, and size of each image.
By clicking in the buttom "Instructions in Spanish" you will have access to the original instructions (in spanish) that were read to the participants before starting each rating session.
By clicking in the buttom "Instructions in English" you will have access to the translation into english of the instructions (in spanish) that were read to the participants before starting each rating session.