Abstract
Self-assessment methods are broadly employed in emotion research for the collection of subjective affective ratings. The Self-Assessment Manikin (SAM), a pictorial scale developed in the eighties for the measurement of pleasure, arousal, and dominance, is still among the most popular self-reporting tools, despite having been conceived upon design principles which are today obsolete. By leveraging on state-of-the-art user interfaces and metacommunicative pictorial representations, we developed the Affective Slider (AS), a digital self-reporting tool composed of two slider controls for the quick assessment of pleasure and arousal. To empirically validate the AS, we conducted a systematic comparison between AS and SAM in a task involving the emotional assessment of a series of images taken from the International Affective Picture System (IAPS), a database composed of pictures representing a wide range of semantic categories often used as a benchmark in psychological studies. Our results show that the AS is equivalent to SAM in the self-assessment of pleasure and arousal, with two added advantages: the AS does not require written instructions and it can be easily reproduced in latest-generation digital devices, including smartphones and tablets. Moreover, we compared new and normative IAPS ratings and found a general drop in reported arousal of pictorial stimuli. Not only do our results demonstrate that legacy scales for the self-report of affect can be replaced with new measurement tools developed in accordance to modern design principles, but also that standardized sets of stimuli which are widely adopted in research on human emotion are not as effective as they were in the past due to a general desensitization towards highly arousing content.
Highlights
Psychological research on emotions has a long past dating back to the second half of the 19th century with Charles Darwin who explained affective states as means of communication to () survive [1] and the, so called, James-Lange theory, which defined the manifestationPLOS ONE | DOI:10.1371/journal.pone.0148037 February 5, 2016The Affective Slider: A Digital Self-Assessment Scale for the Measurement of Human Emotions of emotions as a consequence of physiological changes in arousal [2]
We collected a total of 18540 single ratings, divided between Self-Assessment Manikin (SAM) and Affective Slider (AS) on a picture set composed of 1178 different images from the International Affective Picture System (IAPS) database, each of which was rated on average 15.2±3.9 times
In order to establish the similarity of the ratings obtained with AS and those rendered through SAM, we calculated the Spearman’s correlation coefficient between the measured affective dimensions
Summary
Psychological research on emotions has a long past dating back to the second half of the 19th century with Charles Darwin who explained affective states as means of communication to () survive [1] and the, so called, James-Lange theory, which defined the manifestationPLOS ONE | DOI:10.1371/journal.pone.0148037 February 5, 2016The Affective Slider: A Digital Self-Assessment Scale for the Measurement of Human Emotions of emotions as a consequence of physiological changes in arousal [2]. Physiological data, are prone to artifacts and can present drawbacks, in particular when acquired in ecologically-valid conditions [3,4,5]. For this reason, a common practice is to couple such measures to self-assessment scales or questionnaires. One of the most popular among the existing self-reporting tools is the Self-Assessment Manikin (SAM) proposed by Bradley and Lang in 1994 [6], which is broadly adopted in psychological studies as well as in a wide range of fields that span from marketing to advertising. The original SAM paper [6] has collected in total over 3200 citations since its publication and it was cited in more than 2200 peer-reviewed scientific articles in the last 5 years alone (source: Google Scholar, http://scholar.google.com)
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