Emotions

Conceptual Issues

Psychologists distinguish among several interrelated constructs that are each associated with the everyday use of the word ‘emotion’. The presumably most fundamental concept is that of ‘affect’. Affect has been characterized as the first stage of an organism's reaction to stimuli, an experiential process that precedes and is possibly independent of those processes labelled as ‘cognitive’ (Zajonc, 2000). Affect is a process in which subjective, evaluative information is derived from the flow of perception. Affects can be consciously experienced as ‘feelings’, and are often described in terms of pleasure, displeasure, and degree of activation. Affective feelings are thought to play a key role in the judgements, preferences, and behavioural action patterns critical for survival.

Affect is closely linked to ‘mood’, which is most often conceptualized as a sustained affective experience. Mood can be thought of as a comparatively stable affective state that is not necessarily aroused by a particular event. Researchers have found that mood is correlated with particular personality traits, an association which may contribute to the stability of overarching affective dispositions throughout life.

What most psychologists refer to as ‘emotions’ are feeling states that are both briefer and more intense than moods. A necessary component of emotion assessment is the measurement of affect, its fundamental ingredient. Emotion assessment quite often also involves measuring cognitive, physiological, and behavioural response domains (see Figure 1).

The Description of Affect

Some theorists posit that affect is not a cognitive process per se, but is better conceptualized as a rather primitive and irreducible psychological experience. Nevertheless, cognitive representations of affective experience are made. One fruitful approach to the measurement of affect has thus been to consider the interaction of affect with its cognitive representation. One assumption underlying this approach is that everyday language-especially emotion-related words – is replete with affective meanings that can be described along two or more dimensions.

The dimensional perspective offers a simple yet powerful measurement strategy that enables the scalar representation of phenomena that are clearly experienced but not fully captured with language. Different interpretations have been provided for the mathematical solutions used to derive affect dimensions. For example, in his analyses of emotion-related words, Russell (1979) proposed two bipolar dimensions to describe affective experience: a valence dimension anchored at either end by strong pleasure and displeasure, and an arousal or activation dimension ranging from low to high levels of arousal (cf. Watson & Tellegen, 1985). As these dimensions were specified to be uncorrelated, they can be represented in a two-dimensional, Cartesian space. The resulting circumplex model of emotion-related words is applicable across various languages, and provides researchers and practitioners alike with a way to measure and represent the affective feeling states and associated behaviours.

Commonly used self-report measures of affective experience include the Affect Circumplex (Larsen & Diener, 1992), the PANAS (Watson, Clark & Tellegen, 1988), and the Self-Assessment Manikin (SAM; Lang, Bradley & Cuthbert, 1995). Measures are also available to assess comparatively trait-like components of affect, including intensity (e.g. Bachorowski & Braaten, 1994) and expressivity (Kring, Smith & Neale, 1994). These and other measures can be used, for instance, in detailed examinations of the structure of consciously perceived affective experience, and to monitor change in response to therapeutic intervention.

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