Patent ID: 7136877

Claim:
A computer program stored on a computer readable medium, comprising: a vocabulary database comprising machine readable data corresponding to a plurality of vocabulary words and a lexical impact value respectively corresponding to each vocabulary word; comparison instructions comprising machine readable instructions for comparing a plurality of text words of a piece of text to the vocabulary database to determine a lexical impact value for each text word that corresponds to a vocabulary word; and output instructions comprising machine readable instructions for outputting the lexical impact value of the text words that correspond to vocabulary words as output data for users to make text word selections or assess the lexical impact values of words in a computer system; wherein the lexical impact value comprises a plurality of constituent sub-values, with each constituent sub-value corresponding to lexical impact with respect to a different type of emotional response; wherein lexical impact is an emotional response that can be expected in a reader due to an underlying associative meaning of an individual word taken out of context rather than an emotional response that the individual word can be expected to have on the reader due to the meaning of the individual word in context, wherein the lexical impact values are derived from psychosocial dictionaries, opinions, experiments, or a combination thereof.