A Study of the Hevner Adjective List

Abstract

tive list.' 2 While originally intended for work in music it has been borrowed for research in other sensory areas.3 Its 67 words, which are arranged in eight clusters, describe a variety of moods. The moodal quale expressed by the adjectives within any one cluster has been assumed to be almost identical. Hence, it has become customary to describe musical phrases, objects of art, or other items of aesthetic interest in terms of the list's eight clusters rather than its 67 adjectives. Since these adjective clusters have received so much attention it seemed to the writer important to put them through certain tests, primarily to learn whether or not the members of any given cluster were describing the roughly similar moods Hevner had intended. A check was also planned on the idea that the clusters formed a sort of clock dial or circle with the mood described by the adjectives of cluster 2 most similar to moods characterized by clusters 1 and 3, that described by 5 most like those represented by 4 and 6, etc. The plan of the research was to present to two hundred subjects some 56 musical phrases, each of which kept reasonably well to a single mood. The Hevner adjectives would be given to the subjects along with each musical phrase. The directive would be to check as many adjectives as seemed appropriate or to add others not in the list if additions seemed needed.4 The plan called for the counting of the adjectives checked for each musical phrase and for an assessment of the phrase in terms of the 67 (actually only 66) adjectives. Thus, the phrase receiving most checks for sentimental would obtain the rank of 1 for that adjective, or, conversely, sentimental would receive a 1 for that phrase. Every adjective, then, would possess a series of ranks from 1 through 56, made from the checks it received while the 56 musical phrases were being played. These rank orders could then be correlated to show the tally resemblances, the degrees to which the adjectives had similar moodal meanings. During the autumn of 1951 and the winter of 1952 two hundred students were drawn from Stanford University's courses in elementary psychology to serve as subjects. Required to take part in five researches, they had chosen this * This paper was presented in part before the 1953 meetings of the Esthetics Division of the American Psychological Association. The study was partially financed by Stanford's Committee on Supplementary Research Grants. 'Hevner, K., Experimental studies of the elements of expression in music, Amer. J. Psychol., 48 (1936), 246-268. 2 Hevner, K., Expression in music: a discussion of experimental studies and theories, Psychol. Rev., 47 (1935), 186-204. 3 Ross, R. T., Studies in the psychology of the theatre, Psychol. Rec., 2 (1938), 127-190. 4 Since the subjects added very few new adjectives, only those of the standard list are considered in this paper.