Sounds of Words Give Us An Emotional Rush

Sam Nash
3 min readOct 28, 2020

A study published in the journal, Psychological Science, claims that some sound combinations of words elicit different emotional responses in our brains. Even before the current pandemic hit the headlines, the sound of the word ‘virus’ triggered a measurable reaction.

It seems that the researchers of the study, “Affective Arousal Links Sounds to Meaning”, also investigated the correlation between shapes and sounds. When volunteers were presented with a spiky shape and a rounded shape and then asked to predict which of the two was named Kiki and which was…

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Sam Nash

Sam writes scifi thrillers & also historical fiction as Sam Taw. She's also the editor of the Historical Times interactive magazine. www.historicaltimes.org