PsychologicalReports, 2007, 101, 101 1-1015. 0 Psychological Reports 2007 WORD EMOTIONALITY AND THE STRUCTURE OF THE OLD TESTAMENT BOOK OF RUTH ' CYNTHIA WHISSELL Luurentzun University Summary.-Words in the World English Bible version of the book of Ruth were studied in terms of their emotional implications using the Dictionary of Affect in Lan- guage which matched 2,225 (89%) of the words. The use of extremely Passive/Un- pleasant words and that of extremely Pleasant words gave evidence of a V and in- verse-V structure, respectively. Ruth was gentle in tone, containing 188% of the nor- mative proportion of Pleasant/Passive words and approximately 50% of the normative proportion of various active and unpleasant categories of words Words convey emotional as well as literal meanings (Osgood, 1969). If it were possible to quantify the emotional tone of natural language, which is composed of words, resultant scores could be used to describe both the over- all emotionality of a language sample and its internal structure. This article reports on the application of a technique designed to measure emotional meaning-the Dictionary of Affect in Language (Whissell, 1989)-to a sam- ple of natural language-the Old Testament book of Ruth-with just such aims in view. Emotional meaning drawn from individual words and averaged over the entire book of Ruth confirms the description of the book as posi- tive in emotional tone: the same meaning averaged over segments reveals that emotion in Ruth follows a V or inverse-V shaped structure. The fact that emotions associated with words can be used to represent emotional reactions to entire language samples is confirmed by research (Whissell, 2003) indicat- ing that volunteers' overall ratings of poetry samples were strongly related to Dictionary of Affect means based on individual words. Scholars from a variety of backgrounds (e.g., Hoerber, 1989; Thomas, 2002) have affirmed that the Old Testament book of Ruth is structured in a balanced fashion around a central point with segments from the second half of the structure mirroring and answering parallel segments from the first. This V or inverse-V shaped structure is represented in Table 1 where paral- lel segments have been labeled with the same letter. The segments proposed by Thomas (2002) and by the Concordia Self-study Bible (Hoerber, 1989) agree, with the exception of one verse (1:6) which was omitted by Thomas. The book of Ruth is in narrative format and was probably written in the post-exilic era (roughly 500 BC; Thomas, 2002). In the modern World En- glish Bible translation, > the book contains approximately 2,500 words. '.4ddress correspondence to C. Whissell, Ph.D., Psycholo y Department, Laurentian University, Sudbury, Ontario P3E 2C6, Canada or e-mail (cwhissell@faurenrinnca). http://ebible.org/bible/web/.