2005 Scherer SSI
2005 Scherer SSI
2005 Scherer SSI
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sume . De nir les emotions est un proble `me bien connu. Sans consensus quant a ` la Re rationnalisation du phe nome `ne exact que lon e tudie, tout conceptualisation et lope
The elaboration of the design feature denition of different affective phenomena has been conducted as part of the HUMAINE Network of Excellence (6th European Framework). The development of the Geneva Emotion Wheel was supported by a grant from the DaimlerBenz Foundation. The development of the Geneva Affect Label Coder was supported by the University of Geneva. The work of the Geneva Emotion Research Group is supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation. The writing of this article has been supported by the Swiss Centre for Affective Sciences. The author acknowledges important contributions to the development of the instruments by Tanja Baenziger, Etienne Roesch, Ursula Scherer, ronique Tran. and Ve Social Science Information & 2005 SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi), 0539-0184 DOI: 10.1177/0539018405058216 Vol 44(4), pp. 695729; 058216
One of the major drawbacks of social science research is the need to resort to everyday language concepts in both theory and empirical investigation. The inherent fuzziness and the constant evolution of these language categories as well as inter-language, inter-cultural, and inter-individual differences make it difcult to dene central working concepts in the universal, invariant, and consensual fashion generally required by a systematic scientic approach. Isolated attempts to articially create more appropriate concepts that are unaffected by the multiple connotations of natural language terms (e.g. Cattells attempt to create a new taxonomy of personality traits using synthetic labels; Cattell, 1990) seem doomed to failure, not only because of the difculty of obtaining widespread consensus in the scientic community but also because of the need of much of social science to work with lay persons self-report, which makes it mandatory to employ lay or naive concepts. The concept of emotion presents a particularly thorny problem. Even though the term is used very frequently, to the point of being extremely fashionable these days, the question What is an emotion? rarely generates the same answer from different individuals, scientists or laymen alike. William James tried to give an authoritative answer in 1884, but only started a continuing debate which is currently nding renewed vigor (Niedenthal et al., 2005). The number of scientic denitions proposed has grown to the point where counting seems quite hopeless (Kleinginna and Kleinginna already reviewed more than one hundred in 1981). In frustration,
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scientists have attempted to have recourse to the analysis of the everyday use of the folk concepts: emotions are what people say they are (e.g. Averill, 1980; Frijda et al., 1995). However, as the debate in this journal, following the report of the rst quasirepresentative study of emotional experience (Scherer et al., 2004; Scherer, 2004a) has shown, scholars from different disciplines in the humanities and the social and behavioral sciences rarely agree on how to use this evidence. While this kind of conceptual and denitional discussion can have a stimulating effect in the short run, it can have stiing consequences for the advancement in the eld and for collaborative research between different disciplines. At a time when it is increasingly recognized that affective and emotional phenomena need to be addressed in a genuinely interdisciplinary fashion (see the Handbook of the Affective Sciences; Davidson et al., 2003b), it becomes imperative to generate a minimal consensus about the dening features of the different types of affective phenomena. In this piece I do not systematically review these issues. Rather, I want to describe and defend a programmatic statement of a component process denition of emotion that I rst proposed in 1982 in this journal (Scherer, 1982; see also Scherer, 1984a, 2001). Mention of componential theories of emotion is quite widespread today and the notion of emotions as component processes seems to gain increasing acceptance. Following a brief description of the component process denition, I examine what the dening characteristics of emotion are and how these differ from other affect states. In addition, I explore the problem of linking folk concepts of emotion to a scientic, component process conceptualization. Finally, I discuss how emotions can best be measured empirically and introduce two new instruments.
A component process denition of emotion and feeling In the framework of the component process model, emotion is dened as an episode of interrelated, synchronized changes in the states of all or most of the ve organismic subsystems in response to the evaluation of an external or internal stimulus event as relevant to major concerns of the organism (Scherer, 1987, 2001). The components of an emotion episode are the respective states of the ve subsystems and the process consists of the coordinated changes
TABLE 1 Relationships between organismic subsystems and the functions and components of emotion Emotion function Organismic subsystem and Emotion component major substrata Information processing (CNS) Support (CNS, NES, ANS) Cognitive component (appraisal) Neurophysiological component (bodily symptoms) Motivational component (action tendencies) Motor expression component (facial and vocal expression) Subjective feeling component (emotional experience)
Preparation and direction Executive (CNS) of action Communication of reaction and behavioral intention Monitoring of internal state and organism environment interaction Action (SNS)
Monitor (CNS)
Note: CNS central nervous system; NES neuro-endocrine system; ANS autonomic nervous system; SNS somatic nervous system.
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construct consists of the coordination and synchronization of all of these systems during an emotion episode, driven by appraisal (Scherer, 2004b). How can emotions, as dened above, be distinguished from other affective phenomena such as feelings, moods, or attitudes? Let us take the term feeling rst. As shown in Table 1, the component process model reserves the use of this term for the subjective emotional experience component of emotion, presumed to have an important monitoring and regulation function. In fact, it is suggested that feelings integrate the central representation of appraisal-driven response organization in emotion (Scherer, 2004b), thus reecting the total pattern of cognitive appraisal as well as motivational and somatic response patterning that underlies the subjective experience of an emotional episode. Using the term feeling, a single component denoting the subjective experience process, as a synonym for emotion, the total multi-modal component process, produces serious confusions and hampers our understanding of the phenomenon. In fact, it can be argued that the long-standing debate generated by William Jamess peripheral theory of emotion is essentially due to Jamess failure to make this important distinction: when in 1884 he asked What is an emotion?, he really meant What is a feeling? (see Scherer, 2000a).
Using a design feature approach to distinguish emotion from other affective phenomena Having claried the distinction between emotion and feeling, it remains to differentiate emotion (with feeling as one of its components) from other types of affective phenomena. Instances or tokens of these types, which can vary in degree of affectivity, are often called emotions in the literature (or at least implicitly assimilated with the concept). Examples are liking, loving, cheerful, contemptuous, or anxious. I have suggested four such types of affective phenomena that should be distinguished from emotion proper, although there may be some overlap in the meaning of certain words: preferences, attitudes, affective dispositions, and interpersonal stances. How can we differentially dene these phenomena in comparison to emotion? The difculty of differentiating emotion from other types of affective phenomena is reminiscent of a similar problem in dening the
Event focus The denition given above suggests that emotions are generally elicited by stimulus events. By this term I mean that something happens to the organism that stimulates or triggers a response after having been evaluated for its signicance. Often such events will consist of natural phenomena like thunderstorms or the behavior of other people or animals that may have signicance for our wellbeing. In other cases, ones own behavior can be the event that elicits emotion, as in the case of pride, guilt, or shame. In addition to such events that are more or less external to the organism, internal events are explicitly considered as emotion elicitors by the denition. These could consist of sudden neuroendocrine or physiological changes or, more typically, of memories or images that might come to our mind. These recalled or imagined representations of events can be sufcient to generate strong emotions (see also the debate between Goldie, 2004, Parkinson, 2004, and Scherer, 2004a, in this journal). The need for emotions to be somehow connected to or anchored in a specic event, external or internal, rather than being free-oating, resulting from a strategic or intentional decision, or existing as a permanent feature of an individual, constitutes the event focus design feature.
Appraisal driven A central aspect of the component process denition of emotion is that the eliciting event and its consequences must be relevant to
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major concerns of the organism. This seems rather obvious as we do not generally get emotional about things or people we do not care about. In this sense, emotions can be seen as relevance detectors (Frijda, 1986; Scherer, 1984a). Componential theories of emotion generally assume that the relevance of an event is determined by a rather complex yet very rapidly occurring evaluation process that can occur on several levels of processing ranging from automatic and implicit to conscious conceptual or propositional evaluations (Leventhal and Scherer, 1987; van Reekum and Scherer, 1997). The component process model postulates that different emotions are produced by a sequence of cumulative stimulus evaluation or appraisal checks with emotion-specic outcome proles (Ellsworth and Scherer, 2003; Scherer, 1984a, 1993, 2001). For the purposes of design feature analysis I suggest distinguishing between intrinsic and extrinsic appraisal. Intrinsic appraisal evaluates the feature of an object or person independently of the current needs and goals of the appraiser, based on genetic (e.g. sweet taste) or learned (e.g. bittersweet food) preferences (see Scherer, 1987, 1988). Transactional appraisal (see Lazarus, 1968, 1991) evaluates events and their consequences with respect to their conduciveness for salient needs, desires, or goals of the appraiser. The design features event focus and appraisal basis are linked, highlighting the adaptational functions of the emotions, helping to prepare appropriate behavioral reactions to events with potentially important consequences.
Response synchronization This design feature of the proposed emotion denition is also implied by the adaptational functions of emotion. If emotions prepare appropriate responses to events, the response patterns must correspond to the appraisal analysis of the presumed implications of the event. Given the importance of the eliciting event, which disrupts the ow of behavior, all or most of the subsystems of the organism must contribute to response preparation. The resulting massive mobilization of resources must be coordinated, a process which can be described as response synchronization (Scherer, 2000b, 2001). I believe that this is in fact one of the most important design features of emotion, one that in principle can be operationalized and measured empirically.
Behavioral impact Emotions prepare adaptive action tendencies and their motivational underpinnings. In this sense they have a strong effect on emotionconsequent behavior, often interrupting ongoing behavior sequences and generating new goals and plans. In addition, the motor expression component of emotion has a strong impact on communication which may also have important consequences for social interaction.
Intensity Given the importance of emotions for behavioral adaptation, one can assume the intensity of the response patterns and the corresponding emotional experience to be relatively high, suggesting that this may be an important design feature in distinguishing emotions from moods, for example.
Duration Conversely, as emotions imply massive response mobilization and synchronization as part of specic action tendencies, their duration must be relatively short in order not to tax the resources of the organism and to allow behavioral exibility. In contrast, lowintensity moods that have little impact on behavior can be maintained for much longer periods of time without showing adverse effects.
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Following Hocketts example of characterizing different animal and human communication systems with the help of a set of design features, Table 2 shows an attempt to specify the proles of different affective phenomena and the emotion design features described above (the table shows a revised version of the matrix rst proposed in Scherer, 2000c). Based on these assumptions, one can attempt as follows to differentially dene affective phenomena in distinguishing them from emotions. 1) Preferences. Relatively stable evaluative judgments in the sense of liking or disliking a stimulus, or preferring it or not over other objects or stimuli, should be referred to as preferences. By denition, stable preferences should generate intrinsic appraisal (intrinsic pleasantness check), independently of current needs or goals, although the latter might modulate the appraisal (Scherer, 1988). The affective states produced by encountering attractive or aversive stimuli (event focus) are stable and of relatively low intensity, and do not produce pronounced response synchronization. Preferences generate unspecic positive or negative feelings, with low behavioral impact except tendencies towards approach or avoidance. 2) Attitudes. Relatively enduring beliefs and predispositions towards specic objects or persons are generally called attitudes. Social psychologists have long identied three components of attitudes (see Breckler, 1984): a cognitive component (beliefs about the attitude object), an affective component (consisting mostly of differential valence), and a motivational or behavioral component (a stable action tendency with respect to the object, e.g. approach or avoidance). Attitude objects can be things, events, persons, and groups or categories of individuals. Attitudes do not need to be triggered by event appraisals although they may become more salient when encountering or thinking of the attitude object. The affective states induced by a salient attitude can be labeled with terms such as hating, valuing, or desiring. Intensity and response synchronization are generally weak and behavioral tendencies are often overridden by situational constraints. While it may seem prosaic, I suggest treating love as an interpersonal attitude with a very strong positive affect component rather than an emotion. The notion of loving someone seems to imply a long-term affective disposition rather than a brief episodic feeling, although thoughts of or the interaction with a loved person can produce strong and complex
TABLE 2 Design feature differentiation of different types of affective phenomena Design features Type of affect Preferences Attitudes Moods Affect dispositions Interpersonal stances Aesthetic emotions Utilitarian emotions VL VL L VL H H VH VH L M L L VH M M L L VL L L VH VL VL L VL L MH VH VL L M VL VH H VH M L H L H L VH L M M L M LM H M H H VH M L L Event focus Intrinsic appraisal Transactional appraisal Synchronization Rapidity of change Behavioral impact Intensity Duration
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emotions, based on intrinsic and transactional appraisal and characterized by strong response synchronization. This is an example of how more stable affect dispositions can make the occurrence of an emotion episode more likely as well as introducing specic response patterns and feeling states. 3) Mood. Emotion psychologists have often discussed the difference between mood and emotion (e.g. Frijda, 2000). Generally, moods are considered as diffuse affect states, characterized by a relative enduring predominance of certain types of subjective feelings that affect the experience and behavior of a person. Moods may often emerge without apparent cause that could be clearly linked to an event or specic appraisals. They are generally of low intensity and show little response synchronization, but may last over hours or even days. Examples are being cheerful, gloomy, listless, depressed, or buoyant. 4) Affect dispositions. Many stable personality traits and behavior tendencies have a strong affective core (e.g. nervous, anxious, irritable, reckless, morose, hostile, envious, jealous). These dispositions describe the tendency of a person to experience certain moods more frequently or to be prone to react with certain types of emotions, even upon slight provocation. Not surprisingly, certain terms like irritable or anxious can describe both affect dispositions as well as momentary moods or emotions and it is important to specify whether the respective term is used to qualify a personality disposition or an episodic state. Affect dispositions also include emotional pathology; while being in a depressed mood is quite normal, being always depressed may be a sign of an affective disturbance, including a clinical syndrome of depression requiring medical attention. 5) Interpersonal stances. The specicity of this category is that it is characteristic of an affective style that spontaneously develops or is strategically employed in the interaction with a person or a group of persons, coloring the interpersonal exchange in that situation (e.g. being polite, distant, cold, warm, supportive, contemptuous). Interpersonal stances are often triggered by events, such as encountering a certain person, but they are less shaped by spontaneous appraisal than by affect dispositions, interpersonal attitudes, and, most importantly, strategic intentions. Thus, when an irritable person encounters a disliked individual there may be a somewhat
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or the preparation of specic, adaptive action tendencies (Frijda, 1986). For example, the most commonly reported bodily symptoms for intense aesthetic experiences are goose pimples, shivers, or moist eyes all rather diffuse responses which contrast strongly with the arousal and action-oriented responses for many utilitarian emotions.
Exploring the semantic space of folk concepts of emotion How many emotions are there? I submit that there is currently no answer to this question. Proponents of discrete emotion theories, inspired by Darwin, have suggested different numbers of so-called basic emotions (Ekman, 1972, 1992; Izard, 1971, 1992; Tomkins, 1962, 1984). Most of these are utilitarian emotions as dened above and play an important role in adapting to frequently occurring and prototypically patterned types of signicant events in the life of organisms. In consequence, emotions like anger, fear, joy, and sadness are relatively frequently experienced (with anger and joy outranking all others; see the quasi-representative actuarial survey reported by Scherer et al., 2004). Given the aspects of frequency and prototypicality, I have suggested calling these emotions modal rather than basic, given that there is little consensus as to the meaning and criteria for how basic is to be dened (Scherer, 1994). Obviously, the small number of basic or modal emotions (something between 6 and 14 depending on the theorists) is hardly representative for the range of human (or possibly even animal) emotionality. I have argued (Scherer, 1984a) that there are as many different emotions as there are distinguishably different proles of appraisal with corresponding response patterning. Using the denition proposed above, in particular the necessary criterion of response synchronization, the number of different emotions could be determined empirically. However, this proposal is only of academic interest as, in addition to conceptual problems such as the criterion for a sufcient level of response synchronization, problems of access to a vast range of emotional episodes and measurement problems render such an empirical assessment impossible. I suggest that we need to have recourse to the study of folk concepts of emotion in order to make headway on the question of the number and nature of discriminable types of emotions. If, in the evolution of languages, certain types of distinctions between different types of emotional processes have been considered important
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similarities and differences in emotional experience (Scherer and Wallbott, 1994; Scherer et al., 1986). Semantic grid proles for different emotion terms allow, at least if there is reasonable agreement between raters (in the sense of interrater reliability) the denition of the semantic eld, the meaning, of an emotion term in the respective language. In addition to allowing the examination of subtle differences in the meanings of different emotion terms and providing similarity-of-prole data that can be used to statistically determine the relationships between members of emotion families and the overall structure of the semantic space for emotions, such data for different languages inform us about potential cultural and linguistic differences in emotion encoding. This aspect, apart from the scientic interest (Breugelmans et al., 2005; Fontaine et al., 2002), is of great value in ensuring comparability of instruments in intercultural studies.
How can emotions be measured? If one accepts the denition of emotion outlined above, there is no single gold-standard method for its measurement. Rather, given the component process nature of the phenomenon, only convergent measurement via assessment of all component changes involved can provide a comprehensive measure of an emotion. In other words, in an ideal world of science, we would need to measure (1) the continuous changes in appraisal processes at all levels of central nervous system processing (i.e. the results of all of the appraisal checks, including their neural substrata), (2) the response patterns generated in the neuroendocrine, autonomic, and somatic nervous systems, (3) the motivational changes produced by the appraisal results, in particular action tendencies (including the neural signatures in the respective motor command circuits), (4) the patterns of facial and vocal expression as well as body movements, and (5) the nature of the subjectively experienced feeling state that reects all of these component changes. Needless to say, such comprehensive measurement of emotion has never been performed and is unlikely to become standard procedure in the near future. However, there have been major advances in recent years with respect to measuring individual components such as appraisal (Scherer et al., 2001), brain mechanisms (Davidson et al., 2003a), physiological response patterns (Stemmler, 2003), and expressive behavior (Harrigan et al., 2005).
TABLE 3 Representative items for a grid to prole the semantic elds of different affect labels Appraisal of the eliciting event (E) How suddenly and abruptly did E occur? How familiar was the person with E? How probable is the occurrence of E in general? How pleasant is E in general, independently of the current situation? How unpleasant is E in general, independently of the current situation? How important/relevant is E to the persons current goals or needs? How likely is it that E was mostly caused by chance or natural causes? How likely is it that E was mostly caused by the persons own behavior? How likely is it that E was mostly caused by someone elses behavior? If E is caused by a behavior, how likely is it that E was caused intentionally? Are the potential consequences of E clearly envisaged and may they occur in the near future? Physiological symptoms Feeling cold shivers (neck, chest) Weak limbs Getting pale Lump in throat Stomach troubles Heart beat slowing down Heart beat getting faster Muscles relaxing, restful (whole body) Muscles tensing, trembling (whole body) Breathing slowing down Breathing getting faster Feeling warm, pleasant (whole body) Perspiring, moist hands Sweating (whole body) Feeling hot, puff of heat (cheeks, chest) Motor expression Smiling Mouth opening Mouth closing Mouth tensing Frown Eyes closing Eyes opening Tears Other changes in face Voice volume increasing Voice volume decreasing Voice trembling Voice being assertive Other changes in voice Abrupt bodily movements Action tendencies Moving attention towards E Moving attention away from E Information search Attention self-centered Attention directed towards others Physically moving towards E Physically moving away from E Feelings Intensity Duration Valence Arousal Tension
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Blushing How different is E from what the person Sweating expected at this moment? How likely will the consequences of E bring positive, desirable outcomes to the person (i.e. helping the person to achieve a goal)? How likely will the consequences of E bring negative undesirable outcomes to the person (i.e. preventing the person from achieving a goal)? Did E require the person to react immediately (urgently)? Would the consequences of E be ineluctable or still be avoidable and modiable? Could the consequences of E still be avoided or modied to the persons advantage (through his/her own power or helped by others)? Would the person be able to live with, and adjust to, the consequences of E? How likely is it that E would not be consistent with the persons image of him-herself? How likely is it that E violated laws or social norms? Note: E event.
Moving towards people or things Withdrawing from people or things Moving against people or things Other changes in gesture Silence Short utterance Long utterance Speech melody change Speech disturbance Speech tempo changes
Free response measurement of emotional feeling the Geneva Affect Label Coder To avoid such problems, researchers sometimes choose to use a freeresponse format, asking participants to respond with freely chosen labels or short expressions that in their mind best characterize the nature of the state they experienced. This is not a panacea as some participants, especially those who do not normally attempt to label and communicate their emotional responses, may have problems coming up with appropriate labels. In addition, one can expect individual differences in the range of the active vocabulary which may constrain the responses of some respondents. However, in general the advantages in specicity and accuracy of the responses and the
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elimination of the priming artifact would seem to privilege the use of a free-response format in cases in which maximal accuracy and a ne-grained resolution of the affect description are sought. Unfortunately, this advantage is compromised by the fact that it is generally impossible to analyze free responses in a quantitative, statistical fashion as their number is often extremely high and the response frequency per label extremely low. In consequence, researchers generally sort free responses into a more limited number of emotion categories, using notions of family resemblances and synonyms. To date, there is neither an established procedure for sorting free-response labels or expressions into a smaller number of overarching categories nor agreement as to the number and nature of a standard set of emotion categories. In general, researchers will determine a list of emotion categories in an eclectic fashion or based on a particular theory and then ask coders to classify free responses with more or less explicit coding instructions and more or less concern for reliability. In the interest of the comparability and cumulativeness of ndings from different studies, it seems desirable to develop a standard list of emotion categories to be regularly employed in research using freeresponse report of subjective feeling states and to use a reliable, standardized coding procedure. In this article, I suggest a pragmatic solution, the Geneva Affect Label Coder (GALC), based on an Excel macro program that attempts to recognize 36 affective categories commonly distinguished by words in natural languages and parses text data bases for these terms and their synonyms (as based on established thesauri). I will briey describe the development of the instrument in the context of a large-scale event sampling study of emotional experiences published in this journal (Scherer et al., 2004), where pertinent results are reported. As the instrument was intended for use in a wide variety of emotion-inducing contexts, I decided to choose a rather extensive list of semantic categories that index different types of affect-related experiences covering emotions, moods, and other types of transitory affect states (see the design feature approach discussed above). The 36 categories shown in Table 4 were chosen on the basis of both empirical grounds (occurring in a quasi-representative population survey of what respondents freely report when asked which emotion they experienced yesterday) and published surveys of emotion terms in different languages (Averill, 1975; Gehm and Scherer, 1988; Russell, 1983). An additional criterion for selection of a category
TABLE 4 Affect categories and word stems of pertinent labels for category members Affect categories Admiration/Awe Amusement Anger Anxiety Being touched Boredom Compassion Contempt Contentment Desperation Disappointment Disgust Dissatisfaction Envy Fear Feeling Pertinent words or word stems admir*, ador*, awe*, dazed, dazzl*, enrapt*, enthrall*, fascina*, marveli*, rapt*, reveren*, spellbound, wonder*, worship* amus*, fun*, humor*, laugh*, play*, rollick*, smil* anger, angr*, cross*, enrag*, furious, fury, incens*, infuriat*, irate, ire*, mad*, rag*, resent*, temper , wrath*, wrought* anguish*, anxi*, apprehens*, difden*, jitter*, nervous*, trepida*, wari*, wary, worried*, worry* affect*, mov*, touch* bor*, ennui, indifferen*, languor*, tedi*, wear* commiser*, compass*, empath*, pit* contempt*, denigr*, deprec*, deris*, despi*, disdain*, scorn* comfortabl*, content*, satisf* deject*, desolat*, despair*, desperat*, despond*, disconsolat*, hopeless*, inconsol* comedown, disappoint*, discontent*, disenchant*, disgruntl*, disillusion*, frustrat*, jilt*, letdown, resign*, sour*, thwart* abhor*, avers*, detest*, disgust*, dislik*, disrelish, distast*, loath*, nause*, queas*, repugn*, repuls*, revolt*, sicken* dissatisf*, unhapp* envious*, envy* afraid*, aghast*, alarm*, dread*, fear*, fright*, horr*, panic*, scare*, terror* love, affection*, fond*, love*, friend*, tender*
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Gratitude Guilt Happiness Hatred Hope Humility Interest/Enthusiasm Irritation Jealousy Joy Longing Lust Pleasure/Enjoyment Pride Relaxation/Serenity Relief Sadness Shame Surprise Tension/Stress Positive Negative
grat*, thank* blame*, contriti*, guilt*, remorse*, repent* cheer*, bliss*, delect*, delight*, enchant*, enjoy*, felicit*, happ*, merr* acrimon*, hat*, rancor* buoyan*, condent*, faith*, hop*, optim* devout*, humility absor*, alert, animat*, ardor*, attenti*, curi*, eager*, enrapt*, engross*, enthusias*, ferv*, interes*, zeal* annoy*, exasperat*, grump*, indign*, irrita*, sullen*, vex* covetous*, jealous* ecstat*, elat*, euphor*, exalt*, exhilar*, exult*, ush*, glee*, joy*, jubil*, overjoyed, ravish*, rejoic* crav*, daydream*, desir*, fanta*, hanker*, hark*, homesick*, long*, nostalg*, pin*, regret*, wish*, wistf*, yearn* carnal, lust*, climax, ecsta*, orgas*, sensu*, sexual* enjoy*, delight*, glow*, pleas*, thrill*, zest* pride*, proud* ease*, calm*, carefree, casual, detach*, dispassion*, equanim*, eventemper*, laid-back, peace*, placid*, poise*, relax*, seren*, tranquil*, unruf* relie* chagrin*, deject*, dole*, gloom*, glum*, grie*, hopeles*, melancho*, mourn*, sad*, sorrow*, tear*, weep* abash*, asham*, crush*, disgrace*, embarras*, humili*, shame* amaze*, astonish*, dumbfound*, startl*, stunn*, surpris*, aback, thunderstruck, wonder* activ*, agit*, discomfort*, distress*, strain*, stress*, tense* agree*, excellent, fair, ne, good, nice, positiv* bad, disagree*, lousy, negativ*, unpleas*
Forced choice response measurement of feeling the Geneva Emotion Wheel In many cases, especially those involving highly controlled experimental paradigms, the use of the free-response format is contraindicated, especially when ne-grained scalar measurement on a few standard feeling states is required for the purpose of comparison
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between experimental groups. Psychologists have used two major methods to obtain forced-choice self-reports of emotional experience: (1) the discrete emotions approach, and (2) the dimensional approach. The rst, the discrete emotions approach, goes back to the origin of language and the emergence of words and expressions describing clearly separable states. The approach has a venerable scientic history in the sense that since the dawn of behavioral science philosophers have used emotion words to analyze human emotional experience. Darwin (1998) has made this approach palatable for the biological and social sciences in showing the evolutionary continuity of a set of basic emotions and identifying observable physiological and expressive symptoms that accompany them. The discrete emotions approach relies on the categorization that is reected in the organization of the semantic elds for emotion in natural languages. The justication for accepting the structure provided by language is the fact that the language-based categories seem to correspond to unique response patterns, i.e. emotion-category specic patterns of facial and vocal expressions as well as physiological response proles. Given the primary role of natural language categories for emotions as reected by emotion words, the method of assessing selfreport used by researchers adopting the discrete emotions approach is the use of scales with nominal, ordinal, or interval characteristics. Generally the researcher provides the respondent with a list of emotion terms and the latter is alternatively asked (1) to check terms that best describe the emotion experienced (nominal scale), (2) to indicate on a 3- to 5-point scale whether the respective emotion was experienced a little, somewhat, or strongly (ordinal scale), or (3) to use an analog scale to indicate how much an emotion has been experienced (e.g. on an underlying dimension from 0 to 100 interval scale). Methods vary on whether respondents are to respond on only the most pertinent emotion scale, to respond on two or more scales to indicate possible blends, or to respond to all scales in a list (replying with none or 0 for categories that are not at all appropriate to describe the experience). While there are some standardized instruments of this kind (e.g. Izards Differential Emotion Scale; Izard, 1991), most investigators prefer to create ad hoc lists of emotion categories that seem relevant in a specic research context. While the results obtained with this approach are highly plausible and easily interpretable (given that widely shared language labels are
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One of the major drawbacks of this approach is the difculty of knowing whether the valence dimension describes the intrinsic quality of an eliciting object or the quality of the feeling (which need not coincide). Even more importantly, it is difcult to differentiate the aspect of intensity of feeling from bodily excitation. Thus, extremely intensive anger is likely to be characterized by high arousal whereas intense sadness may be accompanied by very low arousal. Which of these two approaches is preferable? Until now, researchers have rarely specied why they chose one method over another. Generally, methodological choice has followed theoretical convictions as to the degree of differentiatedness of the emotion system that psychologists need to adopt to understand and predict emotional responses. However, one can apply more systematic criteria to justify particular choices. For example, how should one best describe the differences between two individuals who have just experienced an emotion as compared to differentiating between the feelings of the same person at different points in time? After all, psychological measurement is generally interested in describing differences between individuals or between states over time. Specically, which are more comparable: two individuals who share the same point in valence-arousal space or two individuals who use the same word to describe their feelings? Chances are that two individuals who use the same verbal descriptor have more similar emotions than those sharing a point in semantic space. This can be easily demonstrated by the fact that both very fearful and very angry persons would be in a similar region of the two-dimensional space negatively valenced high arousal (see Figure 1). While such regions in two-dimensional space can show sizeable overlap, verbal labels often uniquely identify major elements of the eliciting event (at least in terms of appraisal dimensions) as well as the integrated representation of response patterns. One of the potential shortcomings of dimensional approaches based on valence and arousal is that both dimensions are quite ambiguous. As mentioned above, it is often not clear whether a valence judgment (pleasant or unpleasant) concerns the appraisal of the nature of the stimulus object or event or rather the feeling induced by it. Similarly, arousal or activation ratings may refer to perceived activation in a situation (or image) or to the proprioceptive feeling of physiological arousal induced by the stimulus event. This ambiguity often exists even when the instructions given to participants clearly specify the meaning --
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which is not always the case. If arousal ratings are meant to measure induced physiological activation or excitement, there is the additional problem that this interoception is often erroneous (Vaitl, 1996). Another criterion is the communicability of emotional states between individuals. To describe the coordinates of an individuals position in valence-arousal space is unlikely to provide much information to others, including a researcher who is ignorant of the eliciting situation. Similarly, while some researchers may nd it sufcient to know about valence or arousal, others may need more specic information on emotional experience to make reliable inferences. It is surprising that, given the central role of emotion self-report in this research area, there have been few attempts to develop new instruments that avoid some of the shortcomings of the existing approaches. In what follows I describe such an effort. The design characteristics for the instrument to be developed are as follows:
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concentrating on the feeling component of emotion, in the sense of qualia, rather than asking respondents to judge concrete response characteristics such as sympathetic arousal; going beyond a simple valence-arousal space in order to be better able to differentiate qualitatively different states that share the same region in this space; relying on standard emotion labels in natural languages in order to capitalize on respondents intuitive understanding of the semantic eld; allowing systematic assessment of the intensity of the feeling; going beyond the arbitrariness of choosing different sets of emotion terms and presenting them in very unsystematic fashion by building some emotion structure into the instrument; presenting the instrument in a graphical form that is userfriendly, allowing the respondent to rapidly understand the principle and use the instrument in a reliable fashion.
Starting with the last point, I decided to use appraisal dimensions (or stimulus evaluation checks) to impose structure on the emotion categories (as described by natural language labels) to be used in the instrument. If one adopts the notion that emotions are elicited and differentiated by appraisal, then the structure of the emotion system should be largely determined by the major appraisal dimensions. As shown by numerous studies, the appraisal dimensions that
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ease of reading, the number of emotion families was limited to 4 per quadrant, yielding a total of 16 (which seems reasonable considering that the upper limit of the number of basic emotions is often considered to be around 14). The choice of the concrete families was also in large part determined by what are generally considered to be either basic or fundamental emotions or those frequently studied in the eld. Figure 2 shows the prototype of this instrument which because of its origin and shape has been called the Geneva Emotion Wheel (GEW). In this rst version of the GEW, presented on a computer screen, all members of an emotion family were identied by a specic label, which became visible when moving the mouse across a circle. First attempts at validation of the instrument (Baenziger et al., 2005) showed that it is difcult to reproduce the theoretically predicted intensity scaling of the terms on some of the spikes in the wheel. In consequence, in more recent versions of the GEW we have abandoned the effort to label intermediate intensities with different labels
Conclusions The denition of emotions, distinguishing them from other affective states or traits, and measuring them in a comprehensive and meaningful way have been a constant challenge for emotion researchers in different disciplines of the social and behavioral sciences over a long period of time. I have no illusion about the fact that this contribution will be little more than a drop in an ocean of writing about these topics. Denitions cannot be proven. They need to be consensually considered as useful by a research community in order to guide research, make research comparable across laboratories and disciplines, and allow some degree of cumulativeness, and they are quite central for the development of instruments and measurement operations as well as for the communication of results and the discussion between scientists. If this article, following the discussion of some of these issues in the wake of our actuarial study of Swiss emotions in this journal (Scherer et al., 2004), can help to at least raise the consciousness of the need for progress in this domain, it will have fullled its purpose.
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Klaus Scherer studied economics and social sciences at the University of Cologne, the London School of Economics and Harvard University (PhD 1970). After teaching at the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Kiel and the University of Giessen, he has been full professor of psychology at the University of Geneva since 1985. He is the director of the recently established Swiss Centre for Affective Sciences. His teaching and research activities focus on the nature and function of emotion, in particular the study of cognitive appraisal of emotion-eliciting events, and of facial and vocal emotion expression. His numerous publications include monographs, contributed chapters and papers in international journals. He has edited several collected volumes and handbooks, and co-edits a book series on Affective Science for Oxford University Press. He is the founding co-editor (with R. Davidson) of the journal Emotion. Authors address : Department of Psychology, University of Geneva, 40, Bd du Pont dArve, CH-1205 Geneva, Switzerland. [email : [email protected]]
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