TRAIT LIST GENERATOR

Based on The English List of Trait Words and The Aachen List of Trait Words

This trait list generator is a free resource for researchers in need of a quick way to generate wordlists of English or German trait adjectives and corresponding word attributes.

The trait list generator is based on the work by Britz et al. (2019) and Britz et al. (2023). These two publications present the results of a comprehensive assessment of German and English trait adjectives.

Words from the trait list generator were used in the work by Forster et al. (2019), Forster et al. (2021), and Mainz et al. (2020).

References

Britz S, Rader L, Gauggel S, Mainz V. An English list of trait words including valence, social desirability, and observability ratings. Behav Res Methods. 2023 Aug;55(5):2669-2686. doi: 10.3758/s13428-022-01921-5. Epub 2022 Aug 12. PMID: 35962307; PMCID: PMC10439032.

Britz S, Gauggel S, Mainz V. The Aachen List of Trait Words. J Psycholinguist Res. 2019 Oct;48(5):1111-1132. doi: 10.1007/s10936-019-09649-8. PMID: 31102174.

Forster SD, Drueke B, Britz S, Gauggel S, Mainz V. How females think about themselves and how they assume that significant others think about them: The influence of perspective taking on self-referential processing. PLoS One. 2019 May 31;14(5):e0217870. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0217870. PMID: 31150506; PMCID: PMC6544297.

Forster SD, Beblo T, Pohl S, Steuwe C, Gauggel S, Mainz V. Self-referential processing and perspective taking in patients with a borderline personality disorder. J Psychiatr Res. 2021 Aug;140:87-94. doi: 10.1016/j.jpsychires.2021.05.065. Epub 2021 May 28. PMID: 34098390.

Mainz V, Britz S, Forster SD, Drüke B, Gauggel S. Transcranial Direct Current Stimulation of the Medial Prefrontal Cortex Has No Specific Effect on Self-referential Processes. Front Hum Neurosci. 2020 Mar 11;14:56. doi: 10.3389/fnhum.2020.00056. PMID: 32218726; PMCID: PMC7078362.

How to use

This tool can be useful for a variety of purposes, including creating stimulus material for experiments dealing with the affective processing of English and German trait adjectives. Several queries for the respective word attributes (e.g. range for word length) allow you to create one or several word lists according to your own search criteria. Please note that you can also leave queries empty if they are not relevant for you.

For a detailed description of the word attributes of the 606 German words click here, for a detailed description of the word attributes of the 500 English words click here.

Once you have input all of your search criteria, all you have to do is to press the “Generate Trait List” button, and a list of trait words with corresponding attributes (as well as Mean, Standard Deviation, maximum and minimum values for each attribute) will appear.

It is recommended to check the generated lists for similarity. Please be aware that a small number of traits per list does not guarantee that randomized lists are similar in terms of words attributes!

To get started, simply use the forms below.

606 words
open list

How many wordlists do you want to generate? If query “number of wordlists” and “how many words per list” remain empty, all trait words matching the search criteria are displayed.

If query “number of wordlists” and “how many words per list” remain empty, all trait words matching the search criteria are displayed.

Word length, number of letters per word.
For a range please use the "-" symbol.

Number of syllables per word.
For a range please use the "-" symbol.

Frequency of each word in the German language indicated by frequency categories, calculated with reference to the most common German word. A word is assigned to a particular frequency class (N), if the most common German word “der, die, das” (engl.: “the”) is about 2N- times more common than the respective word. Example: “der, die, das” (engl.: “the”) is about four times more common than “und” (engl.: and). As 4 = 22 (and therefore N = 2), the word “und” is assigned to the frequency class 2. Frequency data were taken from the project “DeReWo—Corpus-based lemma and word form lists” of the “Institute for the German Language” (“Institut für Deutsche Sprache”). Frequency data of this project is freely accessible online. (Institut für Deutsche Sprache. (2014). Korpusbasierte Wortgrundformenliste DEREWO, DeReKo-2014-IIMainArchive-STT.100000, Institut für Deutsche Sprache, Programmbereich Korpuslinguistik, Mannheim, Deutschland. Retrieved from https://www.ids-mannheim.de/digspra/kl/projekte/methoden-neu/derewo/.)
For a range please use the "-" symbol.

Frequency of appearance (of each word) per million words (log10). To avoid negative values, the normalized value for each word was added by 1 before logarithms were taken (log10). Frequency data were taken from the project “dlexDB” (Heister, J., Würzner, K.-M., Bubenzer, J., Pohl, E., Hanneforth, T., Geyken, A., et al. (2011). dlexDB-eine lexikalische Datenbank für die psychologische und linguistische Forschung. Psychologische Rundschau, 10, 10. https://doi.org/10.1026/0033-3042/a000029.) of the University of Potsdam in cooperation with the “Projekt Digitales Wörterbuch der deutschen Sprache” (DWDS, Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften). Frequency data of this project is freely accessible online. Retrieved from: http://www.dlexdb.de/query/kern/typposlem/list/.
For a range please use the "-" symbol.

Mean valence ratings of the total sample (N=100) with negative values for negative valence and positive values for positive valence. See Britz et al. (2019) for more details.
For a range please use the "-" symbol.

Standard deviation of valence ratings. See Britz et al. (2019) for more details.
For a range please use the "-" symbol.

Mean social desirability ratings of the total sample (N=100) with negative values for socially undesirable traits and positive values for socially desirable traits. See Britz et al. (2019) for more details.
For a range please use the "-" symbol.

Standard deviation of social desirability ratings. See Britz et. al. (2019) for more details.
For a range please use the "-" symbol.

500 words
open list

How many wordlists do you want to generate? If query “number of wordlists” and “how many words per list” remain empty, all trait words matching the search criteria are displayed.

If query “number of wordlists” and “how many words per list” remain empty, all trait words matching the search criteria are displayed.

Word length, number of letters per word. Please note that hyphens are also counted as letters.
For a range please use the "-" symbol.

Number of syllables per word.
For a range please use the "-" symbol.

Word frequency coefficients, derived from the SUBTLEX-US database (https://osf.io/7wx25/). Logarithmic calculus to the power of 10 (Log10) was calculated of the frequencies per billion words.
For a range please use the "-" symbol.

Mean valence ratings of the total sample with negative values for negative valence and positive values for positive valence. See Britz et al., The English List of Trait Words (ELoT) including Valence, Social Desirability and Observability Ratings [submitted] for more details.
For a range please use the "-" symbol.

Standard deviation of valence ratings. See Britz et al., The English List of Trait Words (ELoT) including Valence, Social Desirability and Observability Ratings [submitted] for more details.
For a range please use the "-" symbol.

Mean social desirability ratings of the total sample with negative values for socially undesirable traits and positive values for socially desirable traits. See Britz et al., The English List of Trait Words (ELoT) including Valence, Social Desirability and Observability Ratings [submitted] for more details.
For a range please use the "-" symbol.

Standard deviation of social desirability ratings. See Britz et al., The English List of Trait Words (ELoT) including Valence, Social Desirability and Observability Ratings [submitted] for more details.
For a range please use the "-" symbol.

Mean observability ratings of the total sample with values from 1 (extremely difficult to observe) to 4 (extremely easy to observe), reflecting the extend of observability associated with a trait. See Britz et al., The English List of Trait Words (ELoT) including Valence, Social Desirability and Observability Ratings [submitted] for more details.
For a range please use the "-" symbol.

Standard deviation of observability ratings. See Britz et al., The English List of Trait Words (ELoT) including Valence, Social Desirability and Observability Ratings [submitted] for more details.
For a range please use the "-" symbol.