Abstract
Affect plays a major role in the individual’s daily life, driving the sensemaking of experience, psychopathological conditions, social representations of phenomena, and ways of coping with others. The characteristics of affect have been traditionally investigated through physiological, self-report, and behavioral measures. The present article proposes a text-based measure to detect affect intensity: the Affective Saturation Index (ASI). The ASI rationale and the conceptualization of affect are overviewed, and an initial validation study on the ASI’s convergent and concurrent validity is presented. Forty individuals completed a non-clinical semi-structured interview. For each interview transcript, the ASI was esteemed and compared to the individual’s physiological index of propensity to affective arousal (measured by heart rate variability (HRV)); transcript semantic complexity (measured through the Semantic Entropy Index (SEI)); and lexical syntactic complexity (measured through the Flesch–Vacca Index (FVI)). ANOVAs and bi-variate correlations estimated the size of the relationships between indexes and sample characteristics (age, gender), then a set of multiple linear regressions tested the ASI’s association with HRV, the SEI, and the FVI. Results support the ASI construct and criteria validity. The ASI proved able to detect affective saturation in interview transcripts (SEI and FVI, adjusted R2 = 0.428 and adjusted R2 = 0.241, respectively) and the way the text’s affective saturation reflected the intensity of the individual’s affective state (HRV, adjusted R2 = 0.428). In conclusion, although the specificity of the sample (psychology students) limits the findings’ generalizability, the ASI provides the chance to use written texts to measure affect in accordance with a dynamic approach, independent of the spatio-temporal setting in which they were produced. In doing so, the ASI provides a way to empower the empirical analysis of fields such as psychotherapy and social group dynamics.
Highlights
The measurement of the level of affective intensity is a relevant issue for both theoretical and practical reasons
Social representations of forms of alterity have proven to frame their objects in terms of affect-laden meanings—e.g., the securitization frame, i.e., the view of alterity as an incumbent radical threat, is the most common way migration is conveyed by Western media [19]
Affective activation has been considered a major response by which individuals and social groups cope with uncertainty [23,24,25,26]; the analysis of the impact and design of social communication benefit from understanding the capacity of the message to pander to and/or oppose the target’s affective response [27]
Summary
The measurement of the level of affective intensity is a relevant issue for both theoretical and practical reasons. Physiological measures focus on both central (e.g., electroencephalography) and peripheral (e.g., electrodermal conductance, heart rate variability (HRV)) signals to estimate bodily affective activation (for a review, see [28]) The validity of these indexes is generally robust, given that they can be considered direct measures of the intensity of the body’s physiological activation. —such as vocal fundamental frequency [33], speech rate [34], facial expressions [35], and whole-body posture [36]—have been proposed, conceived as markers of one or more features of the intensity of the affective state These measures have been criticized because the association between behavior and affective states is not invariant but depends on contextual conditions [37,38,39,40,41,42,43]. The ASI is designed to detect the ongoing flow of meaning-making, enabling the application of strategies for data analysis (e.g., Time Series Analysis) aimed at modeling the dynamic evolution of communication and cognitive processes
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