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Affect measures


One common way of studying human emotion is to obtain self-reports from participants to quantify their current feelings or average feelings over a longer period of time. These are referred to as measures of affect or measures of emotion. Even though some affect measures contain variations that allow assessment of basic predispositions to experience a certain emotion, tests for such stable traits are usually considered to be personality tests.

The Affective Slider is an empirically-validated digital scale for the self-assessment of affect composed of two slider controls that measure basic emotions in terms of pleasure and arousal, which constitute a bidimensional emotional space called core affect, that can be used to map more complex conscious emotional states.

One frequently used measure for general affective states is the Positive and Negative Affect Schedule (PANAS). Participants completing the PANAS are asked to rate the extent to which they experienced each out of 20 emotions on a 5-point Likert Scale ranging from "very slightly" to "very much". The exact instructions may vary according to the purpose of the study: Participants may be asked how they feel right now or during longer periods of time (e.g. during the past year). Half of the presented emotion words concern negative affect (distressed, upset, guilty, ashamed, hostile, irritable, nervous, jittery, scared, afraid), the other half positive affect (interested, alert, attentive, excited, enthusiastic, inspired, proud, determined, strong, active). The PANAS has been regarded as a highly reliable measure for non-clinical populations. Independent validation studies indicate that the measure demonstrates excellent construct validity.

The expanded version of PANAS is called PANAS-X and includes 60 instead of 20 emotion words (items). The instructions and the answer format are identical to the short PANAS. However, PANAS-X not only measures general positive and negative affect, but also four basic negative emotions (fear, hostility, guilt, and sadness), three basic positive emotions (joviality, self-assurance, and attentiveness), and four more complex affective states (shyness, fatigue, serenity, and surprise). The internal consistency (Cronbach's coefficient alpha) for all of these scales can be regarded sufficient (with all α≥.74), that is people report that they experience all emotions that make up one of the scales with similar strength. The manual of the PANAS-X offers further extensive psychometric information.


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