Comparison of Brazilian and American norms for the International Affective Picture System (IAPS).

OBJECTIVE The present article compares Brazilian and American norms for the International Affective Picture System (IAPS), a set of normative emotional photographic slides for experimental investigations. METHODS Subjects were 1,062 Brazilian university students (364 men and 698 women) who rated 707 pictures from the IAPS in terms of pleasure, arousal, and dominance following the methodology of the original normative study in the US, enabling direct comparison of data from the two samples through Pearson product moment correlation and Student t test. RESULTS All correlations were highly significant with the highest level for the pleasure dimension, followed by dominance and arousal. However, contrary to the American normative values, our data showed that Brazilian subjects generally assigned higher arousal ratings overall. CONCLUSION Our findings confirm that this set of stimuli can be used in Brazil as an affective rating tool due to the high correlations found across the two populations, despite differences on the arousal dimension, which are discussed in detail.

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