Arousal and Valence in the Direct Scaling of Emotional Response to Film Clips1

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Arousal and Valence in the Direct Scaling of Emotional Response to Film Clips1 Motivation and Emotion, Vol. 21, No. 4, 1997 Arousal and Valence in the Direct Scaling of Emotional Response to Film Clips1 Nancy Alvarado2 University of California, San Francisco Contributions of differential attention to valence versus arousal (Feldman, 1995) in self-reported emotional response may be difficult to observe due to (1) confounding of valence and arousal in the labeling of rating scales, and (2) the assumption of an interval scale type. Ratings of emotional response to film clips (Ekman, Friesen, & Ancoli, 1980) were reanalyzed as categorical (nominal) in scale type using consensus analysis. Consensus emerged for valence-related scales but not for arousal scales. Scales labeled Interest and Arousal produced a distribution of idiosyncratic responses across the scale, whereas scales labeled Happiness, Anger, Sadness, Fear, Disgust, Surprise, and Pain, produced consensual response. Magnitude of valenced response varied with both stimulus properties and self-reported arousal. Feldman (1995) presented evidence that individuals differ in their attention to two orthogonal dimensions of emotion: valence (evaluation) and arousal. These differences were noted when subjects were asked to make periodic mood ratings using scales that confound these two aspects of affective ex- perience. Feldman analyzed these ratings in the context of Russell's (1980) circumplex model and Watson and Tellegen's (1985) dimensions of positive affect (PA) and negative affect (NA) and suggested that the structure of 1Preparation of this article was supported in part by National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) grant MH18931 to Paul Ekman and Robert Levenson for the NIMH Postdoctoral Training Program in Emotion Research. I thank Paul Ekman for permitting access to the data analyzed here. I also thank Jerome Kagan and several anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on this manuscript. 2Address all correspondence concerning this article to Nancy Alvarado, who is now at the Department of Psychology (0109), University of California at San Diego, 9500 Gilman Drive, La Jolla, California 92093-0109. 323 0146-7239/97/1200-0323$12..50/0 <8 1997 Plenum Publishing Corporation 324 Alvarado affect changes with the focus of attention. She speculated that valence focus "may be associated with the tendency to attend to environmental, particu- larly social cues " (p. 163) whereas arousal focus may be related to internal (somesthetic) cues, citing Blascovich (1990; Blascovich et al., 1992). This paper presents support for Feldman's views, in a direct-scaling self-report context where valence and arousal are reported independently and the en- vironmental cues are held constant, using data originally collected by Ek- man, Friesen, and Ancoli (1980). Direct Scaling Assumptions Direct scaling of emotional response occurs when a subject is exposed to an affect-inducing stimulus, then asked to introspect and rate the amount of some affect using a rating scale, often labeled with the name of an emo- tion to be reported, and typically numbered in intervals, such as from 1 to 7. Researchers frequently anchor the endpoints of such scales with descrip- tive phrases such as not at all angry, extremely angry, or most anger ever felt in my life. These ratings are treated as judgments on an interval, continuous scale. They are then averaged to produce means which are compared using analysis of variance (ANOVA) or t-test. There is some evidence that self-report judgments of emotional re- sponse are consistent across time for the same individual (Larsen & Diener, 1985, 1987), that self report varies systematically with certain physiological changes associated with emotion and thus may be a valid indicator of emo- tional response (Levenson, 1992), and that higher ratings on a scale do correspond to greater emotional experience for the same individual (mono- tonicity). These findings justify assumption of an ordinal scale type during data analysis. On the other hand, there is no evidence that the subjective distances between adjacent numbers on every portion of the scale are equal, as would be necessary in order to assume that the data are interval in na- ture. Further, aggregation of data and interrater comparisons are problem- atic because it is unclear how individual differences in emotional response are related to individual differences in the use of rating scales. Nor have the distances between numbers been shown to correspond to the same sub- jective differences in response for each individual in a study. Consider temperature as an analogy. We can use an objective scale, such as the Fahrenheit scale, to evaluate the accuracy of subjective judg- ments. However, if we had no such scale, but instead asked subjects to rate temperature based upon the hottest or coldest temperatures they had ever experienced, their subjective experience would be confounded with variations in their devised scales. Unless we know the anchor points and Scaling Emotional Response to Film Clips 325 scale intervals, we cannot know whether two subjects reporting different temperature ratings for the same stimulus are using the same scale but experiencing the temperature differently, or experiencing the temperature as the same but using different scales. If we ignore these difficulties and average their ratings, we obtain a measure that is useful in certain experi- mental contexts but insensitive to individual variations in subjective expe- rience. Rather, we have a scale that assumes that individual differences are unimportant or nonexistent. No objective physical unit of measurement exists to compare against self-reported emotional experience. Even when we supply a 7-point scale anchored by descriptive phrases, we have no way of knowing how the in- dividual interprets such phrases, e.g., how much anger one person has ever felt in his or her lifetime, compared to the maximum experienced by an- other. Further, anchoring using descriptive phrases such as most emotion ever felt in your life invites subjects to apply a scale with unequal distances between intervals, such that the most emotion ever felt on a 10-point scale is not 10 times the amount felt when 1 is reported, but probably far greater. Use of a scale with 100 rather than 10 divisions does not remedy this prob- lem. Use of rating scales to describe emotion is further complicated if mag- nitude is part of the meaning of the label used to identify the scale itself. For example, it is unclear how the difference in meaning between scale labels such as anxiety and fear, or annoyance and fury, would affect the judgments of magnitude made using that scale. Would an experience rated in the middle of an annoyance scale be rated lower if the scale were labeled frustration, anger, or rage? Given these difficulties, the direct scaling of emotional response ap- pears to be, at best, ordinal. As Townsend and Ashby (1984) noted, ". if the strength of one's data is only ordinal, as much of that in the social sciences seems to be, then even a comparison of group mean differences via the standard Z or t test or by analysis of variance is illegitimate. Only those statements and computations that are invariant under monotone (or- der is preserved) transformations are permissible" (p. 395). When the pur- pose of a study is merely to demonstrate a difference using self report as a dependent variable, then the measurement concerns described above are unlikely to affect the validity of the findings. However, when these means tests are used to assert the equality of stimuli presented to evoke emotional response, or the efficacy of such stimuli as an elicitor of a specific emotion, then the concerns raised above become crucial to the findings. Everything that follows in such a study rests upon an initial assumption that mean self-report values are an accurate index of emotional response. 326 Alvarado This problem is relevant to several recent studies investigating the con- gruence between facial activity and self-reported emotional response, as noted by Ruch (1995). In an ongoing controversy over whether smiling is an indicator of expressed feeling, Fridlund (1991) reported that happiness ratings did not parallel electromyelograph (EMG) monitoring of smiling among subjects viewing film clips, but seemed related instead to the so- ciality of the viewing condition. Hess, Banse, and Kappas (1995) improved the measurement of facial activity by monitoring Duchenne versus non- Duchenne smiling and varied the amusement level of the film stimuli pre- sented as well as the viewing context. They found a more complex relationship between social context and smiling. In both studies, the crucial comparison between facial activity and emotional response rested on the accuracy of the self-report ratings, analyzed using an ANOVA across view- ing conditions, and assumed to be a valid measure of emotional response. Use of Direct Rating to Norm Film Clips This study reanalyzes self-report ratings of emotional response to film clips, originally collected by Ekman et al. (1980). These data have been frequently cited by Fridlund (1994) because they contain anomalies that he considers support for his view that smiling is related to social context rather than emotional response. Fridlund's larger issue of the sociality of smiling was addressed by Hess et al. (1995) and will not be discussed further here. This discussion instead will focus upon the complexity involved in demonstrating congruence between self-report ratings and facial activity (or other behavior), and the need to improve methods of collecting and ana- lyzing self-report data. The stimulus set used by Ekman et al. (1980) pro- vides a useful illustration of the methodological and theoretical issues discussed earlier because, unlike many similar studies, it includes both base- line self-report ratings and concurrent ratings using multiple, separately la- beled rating scales. Ekman et al. (1980) compared self-report judgments for 35 subjects with their measured facial expressions when viewing pleasant and unpleas- ant film clips selected for their ability to evoke emotion.
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