Emotional narratives of Chinese learners of Spanish: valence, arousal and grammatical categories

The aim of this research is to analyse the dimensions of valence, arousal and the grammatical categories used in the oral productions of 81 Chinese adult learners of Spanish. For this purpose, three narratives of personal experience were utilized; one of negative valence; one of positive valence, one not emotionally loaded. The results showed that the participants used more positive and high arousal terms even in the narratives of negative valence. Regarding the grammatical categories, verbs were most used by learners, which indicates an emotional codification understood as a social and interpersonal process. These results point out the need to study the oral expression of emotion and to consider linguistic elements beyond descriptive resources, with a qualitative methodology analysing expressive resources and prosody, essential in the emotional communication.