Place×Emotion-JP 2025: emotional and prosocial ratings of 50 places along a niche-construction gradient

Emotional, preference and prosocial ratings by 84 Japanese adults of 50 purpose-built place descriptions spanning five niche-construction stages (natural and Stages 1–4 of cumulative cultural construction). The places are constructed, fictional archetypes rather than real sites, each isolating a single stage while controlling for idiosyncratic associations with named locations. For each place, respondents selected from 24 emotion categories (Plutchik's eight basic emotions × three intensities, multiple choice) and rated willingness-to-visit, solo vs accompanied preference, prior-visit familiarity and revisit intention. Big Five personality (TIPI-J) and current mood were also recorded. The dataset comprises 155 stage-level responses and 6,461 individual emotion selections. Contents: anonymised per-set raw CSVs (set_A–set_E), processed tables (responses_wide, emotion_long, participant_metadata, place_metadata), a codebook, reproducible build/figure scripts, and validation figures. All personally identifying information was removed; participants are referenced only by anonymous identifiers P001–P084. Funded by JSPS KAKENHI Grant-in-Aid for Early-Career Scientists 24K16071.