Dimensions Of Affective Experience Research Articles

William James, Radical Empiricism, and the Affective Ground of Religious Life

William James, Radical Empiricism, and the Affective Ground of Religious Life

The English lexicon of interpersonal affect: Love, etc

Three studies were conducted to determine some aspects of the semantic structure of words referring to positive interpersonal affect. Two studies determined dimensions of difference and families of related words on the basis of the target persons associated with each. These results were compared with those from sorting on the basis of overall similarity of meaning. There was close agreement among the three studies, using different samples of words, indices of similarity, and judges. The relation of the similarity structure of the words to the dimensions of affective experience and to discrete, basic, emotion is discussed.

Behavioral Families and Multiple Causes: Matching the Complexity of Responses to the Complexity of Antecedents

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Dimensions of affective experience in three age groups.

Dimensions of affective experience in three age groups.

Dimensions of affective experience in three age groups.

The dimensions by which adults of differing ages experience emotion were studied by self-administering questionnaires administered to older adults (n = 828) recruited from Elderhostel programs, middle-aged (ages 30-59) children of Elderhostel attenders (n = 231), and young adult (ages 18-29) subjects recruited from college classes or through Elderhostel participants (n = 207). Elders were higher in emotional control, mood stability, and emotional maturity through moderation and leveling of positive affect and lower in surgency, psychophysiological responsiveness, and sensation seeking. These findings are consistent with the hypothesized increase in self-regulatory capacity with age. These cross-sectional differences cannot, however, be distinguished from cohort-related explanations; they require considerable replication across different types of subjects and further characterization of the dimensions in terms of their functions for self-regulation.

Distinguishing between emotion and nonemotion: Judgments about experience

The conceptual distinction between emotion and nonemotion subjective states was investigated in a series of three studies. Three questions were addressed. First, is there high agreement among people in identifying labels for subjective states as either emotion or nonemotion? Second, in judgments of the similarity of subjective states is the emotion-nonemotion distinction more or less salient than other properties of experience? Third, what criteria are used to distinguish conceptually between emotion and nonemotion states? Results indicated that, for many feeling states, there is no substantial agreement as to whether the state should be considered emotion or nonemotion, that the affective dimension of experience is not as salient as are other specific properties of experience (physiological arousal, activity level, valence), and that, in general, people express their individual judgment of emotion-nonemotion on the basis of some nonspecific combination of physiological arousal and character of cognitive state.