A comprehensive database of emotional prototypicality (EmoPro) scores for 1,122 words in second-language (L2) English was provided and aided in selecting L2 English emotion-label words. EmoPro refers to the degree to which a word clearly represents or conveys an emotion. The results showed that EmoPro was influenced by various factors, including valence, arousal, socialness, age of acquisition (AoA) and concreteness. EmoPro in the L2 context demonstrated its ability to predict naming and lexical decision performance. The similarities observed between EmoPro in the L2 and in the first language (L1) exhibited comparable correlations with other emotional and semantic factors and shared associations with predictors in the L1. This study also serves as a valuable tool for research on L2 emotion words, especially in the selection of prototypical emotion-label words in L2 English.

Emotional prototypicality (EmoPro) quantifies the extent to which an emotion-label word represents emotion concepts. While previous research demonstrated faster recognition for high EmoPro words than low EmoPro words in Spanish, the modulation of EmoPro on emotion word recognition in other languages and its dependence on task demands remain unclear. This study employed both the lexical decision task (Experiment 1) and the valence judgment task (Experiment 2) to investigate the EmoPro effect among Chinese speakers. The results not only confirmed the role of EmoPro in Chinese emotion word recognition, supporting the prototype theory of emotion concepts, but also highlighted that the EmoPro effect was more pronounced in the valence judgment task (an explicit emotion task) than in the lexical decision task (an implicit emotion task). This suggests that EmoPro is associated with the ease of accessing emotion concepts and serves as an affective-semantic variable.