Emotion and Measurement

Abstract

This chapter emphasizes the importance of measurement when scientifically dealing with emotion. The role of the actions of the autonomic nervous system (as measured by polygraphs and facial coding systems) is reviewed, and state measures of emotion such as rating scales and mood scales are discussed. In the final two segments of this chapter, personality tests are examined and interpreted as measures of trait emotion. Quantification of emotion based on words in natural language (everyday language that people use in different situations) is exemplified and discussed.

Learning Exercises for This Chapter

12.1.1 Questions and Important Concepts

This section will help you review your learning for this chapter. It is composed of numbered questions (which are also the headings of this chapter). Concepts (important terms and phrases, labeled with letters) appear below most questions. These questions and concepts serve as an outline and summary of this chapter. If you have mastered the material in this chapter, you will be able to answer all the questions and define all the concepts. You should be able to answer each question in about 50–100 words and define each concept in about 20–50 words. Questions and concepts are best understood in the context of the entire chapter, and the information for answering them is always available within this chapter.

• 1. Why be concerned with measuring emotion?

  • (a) You cannot understand things fully unless you observe and then measure them.

• 2. What can be learned from measures of sympathetic activation?

  • (a) Activation of the sympathetic nervous system.

  • (b) Good news about this type of measure.

  • (c) Bad news about this type of measure.

  • (d) Public speaking anxiety example.

  • (e) Gentle and forceful instructions example.

  • (f) Videoing therapy session example.

  • (g) FACS can be used to measure the strength of a facial expression for each of the basic emotions.

• 3. What can be learned from rating scales and mood scales?

  • (a) Rating scales

  • (b) Good and bad news about rating scales

  • (c) Feelings

  • (d) Mood scales

  • (e) PANAS (Positive and Negative Affect Schedule)

  • (f) POMS (Profile of Mood States)

  • (g) Understanding client’s feeling example

  • (h) Reaction to criminals example

• 4. What can be learned from personality tests?

  • (a) Personality tests

  • (b) States

  • (c) Traits

  • (d) Eysenck

  • (e) Five basic personality traits

  • (f) Extroversion

  • (g) Emotional stability

  • (h) Psychoticism or Tough-Mindedness

  • (i) Agreeableness

  • (j) Consciousness

  • (k) Intelligence/Imagination

  • (l) Harshness of sentences example

  • (m) Dedication to work example

  • (n) Learning to practice mindfulness example

• 5. Is it possible to “read” below the surface of language and extract the emotion from it?

  • (a) Denotative meaning

  • (b) Connotative meaning

  • (c) Dictionary of Affect in Language (DAL)

  • (d) Word pleasantness

  • (e) Word activation

  • (f) Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC)

12.1.2 Experiential Learning Element 12.1: AM and PM Moods

Are you a morning person (a lark) or an evening person (an owl)? This ELE (Experiential Learning Element) employs PANAS to examine when, in the day, your emotions are the most positive and when they are the most negative.

• 1. Take the PANAS short form available within this chapter every morning for five weekdays: soon after you get up, and again every evening, on the same days, at around 9:00 or 10:00 p.m. Here is PANAS along with instructions for scoring it, taken from earlier in this chapter:

  • ___ Active

  • ___ Afraid

  • ___ Alert

  • ___ Ashamed

  • ___ Attentive

  • ___ Determined

  • ___ Hostile

  • ___ Inspired

  • ___ Nervous

  • ___ Upset

  To score the I-PANAS-SF, add together all scores for positive emotional words (Active, Alert, Attentive, Determined, Inspired) and, separately, all scores for negative emotional words (Afraid, Ashamed, Hostile, Nervous, Upset).

• 2. Compute your positive and negative affect for all administrations of the test.

• 3. Get an average morning score and an average evening score for each type of affect. Enter them in Table 12.4.

Table 12.4 Positive and negative affects

• 4. Do you notice any trends? If you are a morning person your positive affect will be higher in the morning and your negative affect will be highest in the evening. If you are an evening person, you would expect the opposite results. Take 150–300 words to discuss the presence (or absence) of any trends.

• 5. How do your scores compare to the averages mentioned within this chapter? Here are is the comparative information:

  • For Canada and the United States, an average positive emotion score would be around 19 and an average negative emotion score would be close to 12. Although the maximum score is 25, for both positive and negative affect, scores above 23 could be considered quite high for the positive scale and scores above 16 for the negative scale. Such scores would place you in the top 10 percent for each type of emotion.

  • Do you feel that PANAS describes your emotions accurately? Answer in up to 300 words, making sure to compare your scores to the standards.

12.1.3 Experiential Learning Element 12.2: From Personality to Emotion

If emotion and personality are related, then each of the personality traits described by Eysenck or by the big-five factor theorists should relate to basic emotions. This ELE asks you to compare the eight emotions from Plutchik’s model with the various trait measures of personality discussed in this chapter.

• 1. To think about the relationship of personality and emotion in a more specific way, look at the personality traits listed on the left of Table 12.5 and the emotions (taken from Plutchik’s model) listed across the top.

Table 12.5 Emotions and personality traits

• 2. For each personality trait, pick the several different emotions that you think are related to that trait. Put a plus sign (+) in the box if you think the emotion is involved directly in the trait and a minus sign (−) if the opposite of the emotion is involved. For example, for Extroversion, I put a + under Boldness and a − under Surprise. You might not agree with me, so feel free to ignore these entries. Make your own entries including at least two emotions for every personality trait.

• 3. When you have completed this task, you will be able to read each line of the table in this way: “The personality trait of Extroversion involves the emotions of high Boldness and low Surprise.”

• 4. If this is an assignment, provide the completed table and take up to 250 words to discuss the task and answer two questions:

  • (a) For which traits did you find it most difficult to identify related emotions? Why do you think this is so?

  • (b) Did you rate Agreeableness and Psychoticism in exactly opposite ways? Remember, they are essentially opposite to one another.

12.1.4 Experiential Learning Element 12.3: Public Personas

We often imagine that we know and understand the personality of public figures such as politicians, film stars, and athletes. What we are responding to is not their personality but rather their persona. A persona is the face a person presents to the public. The word persona can also apply to roles that an actor plays. This ELE is designed to allow you to describe the persona of a famous figure, and, at the same time, gain some deeper experience of personality tests.

• 1. Choose a public figure whose persona you know relatively well.

• 2. Now go to the website for the five-factor personality test that we mentioned earlier in this chapter (https://openpsychometrics.org/tests/IPIP-BFFM/). Answer all the test questions AS IF you were depicting the persona of the figure you have chosen. For example, if you chose Queen Elizabeth, you should answer all the questions as you imagine that she would. (Please remember to indicate that this is not serious data, when the website asks you about it!)

• 3. Once you have completed the questionnaire, you will get a personality description along the five factors that we have been discussing.

• 4. Take up to 500 words in total to answer the following three questions:

  • (a) What is the persona of the figure you are interested in?

  • (b) Do you think the test depicts it accurately?

  • (c) As you were completing the test, did you feel that you could recognize which trait was being assessed by individual questions? Could you tell when something was “an Extroversion question” or “an Agreeableness question”?

12.1.5 Experiential Learning Element 12.4: Emotions, Moods, and Feelings

We have been using several different words to refer to similar human experiences. The chief among these words are emotions, moods, and feelings. The meanings of these words are, of course, overlapping, but the three words have slightly different implications. They are not identical. This ELE addresses the meanings of the three words.

• 1. Ask two or three volunteers to join you in a discussion group.

• 2. When you are together, discuss the issue of definitions for words that are used to reflect emotion. The three main words are emotions, moods, and feelings.

• 3. Look up some dictionary definitions to help the discussion along. Try to find at least two different dictionary definitions for each word.

• 4. Prepare a 250-word overview of the result of your group discussions and the dictionary definitions.

• 5. Answer each of the following questions in 25–75 words:

  • (a) If a person is experiencing them, which of the three (emotions, moods, feelings) lasts the longest. Why do you think so?

  • (b) If a person is experiencing them, which of the three would be most dependent on bodily responses? Why do you think so?

  • (c) If a person is experiencing them, which of the three would be most dependent thinking or cognition? Why do you think so?

12.1.6 Experiential Learning Element 12.5: Using LIWC

This ELE is designed to give you some first-hand experience in working with scoring texts for the emotion in language.

• 1. Go online and find the complete lyrics for the national anthems of Canada, the United States, Britain, Australia, and New Zealand.

• 2. Using cut-and-paste, drop each anthem, one at a time, into the LIWC free scoring box available at: www.liwc.app and click “TRY IT NOW” in the middle of the ribbon at the top of the page.

• 3. Put your percentage scores in the Table 12.6 below. I have already included the comparative standard scores (for general examples of English language materials).

Table 12.6 Comparing national anthems

• 4. Compute averages for all anthems in the rows just above the comparative standard.

• 5. Interpret your results by answering the following questions in 700–1000 words:

  • (a) Which national anthem uses the most I-words? The fewest?

  • (b) Which national anthem uses the most social words? The fewest?

  • (c) Which national anthem uses the most positive emotion words? The fewest?

  • (d) Which national anthem uses the most negative emotion words? The fewest?

  • (e) Which national anthem uses the most thinking (cognition) words? The fewest?

  • (f) How are national anthems, as a group, different from the comparative standard?

12.1.7 Mind-Benders

Each Mind-Bender asks you a question that you cannot answer simply by reading this chapter. You have to think beyond this chapter. Mind-Benders are prompts for long essay answers of 500 or more words. Even if you are not asked to write the full essay, think of each of these in terms of how you might answer them.

• 1. Measuring emotion by measuring hormones in the bloodstream has not been discussed. Could this be a useful approach? Why or why not?

• 2. Likewise, measuring emotion by measuring neurotransmitters in the brain has not been discussed. Could this be a useful approach? Why or why not?

• 3. Are there any reasons why we should not allow anyone (other than ourselves) to see the results of our personality tests? What could go wrong if our scores were made public?

• 4. Design some exciting experiments, using the techniques discussed in this chapter to measure emotion in language. Use either or both of the DAL and LIWC. Explain what you expect to find out from your research.

• 5. A technique practiced in early psychotherapy is known as “word association.” The therapist might say words such as “brother” or “wife” and the client would have to say the first words that came to their mind in association with the prompt. The belief was that true emotions about the prompt would be revealed in the free associations. Is there any way that we can measure the emotions in free associations?

• 6. What is the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator and what does it measure? (Use your search engine for this one.)