Adaptation level and the affective appraisal of environments

Abstract

People appraise environments as pleasant, gloomy, stressful, and so on. A model concerning such affective appraisals is proposed in which the theory of adaptation level is combined with a descriptive model of affective categories. Three experiments tested the model by showing subjects an anchor scene to change their adaptation level (AL). One experiment ( N = 234) showed that the change in AL shifted subjects' appraisal of a target scene in the manner predicted: the magnitude of shift was proportional to the magnitude of change in AL induced by the anchor; the direction of shift was 180° different from the direction of change in AL induced by the anchor. The shift was measurable in terms of changes in degree of pleasantness and arousing quality attributed to the target, but also corresponded to predicted changes in the applicability to the target of such categorical affective descriptors as sad and calm. A second experiment ( N = 180) showed similar results for a target scene more extreme in affective quality than that studied in the first experiment. A third experiment ( N = 60) showed similar results with a set of 40 commonly used affective descriptors.