Affect grid : A single-item scale of pleasure and arousal

This article introduces a single-item scale, the Affect Grid, designed as a quick means of assessing affect along the dimensions of pleasure-displeasure and arousal-sleepiness. The Affect Grid is potentially suitable for any study that requires judgments about affect of either a descriptive or a subjective kind. The scale was shown to have adequate reliability, convergent validity, and discriminant validity in 4 studies in which college students used the Affect Grid to describe (a) their current mood, (b) the meaning of emotion-related words, and (c) the feelings conveyed by facial expressions. Other studies are cited to illustrate the potential uses of the Affect Grid as a measure of mood. In this article, we introduce the Affect Grid, a scale designed as a quick means of assessing affect along the dimensions of pleasure-displeasure and arousal-sleepiness. The Affect Grid is potentially suitable for any study that requires judgments about affect of either a descriptive or a subjective kind. The Affect Grid is a single-item scale. Our aim was for an instrument that would be short and easy to fill out and that could, therefore, be used rapidly and repeatedly. Currently available scales of affect are multiple-item checklists or questionnaires that are too time-consuming or too distracting for some purposes. In particular, they do not lend themselves to continuous or quickly repeated observation. They are awkward in dealing with the rapid fluctuations of affect that occur, for example, in response to music, or for all we know, to many everyday emotion-laden events. In repeated-meas ures designs, subjects tiring of the same checklist may eventually become less conscientious or, in longitudinal studies, drop out of the study. Researchers who have wanted something quick and simple have sometimes resorted to homespun measures—with resulting uncertainty as to precisely what is being measured and how well. The Affect Grid is shown in Figure 1. The subject is asked to take several minutes beforehand to learn precisely how to use it. General instructions for this purpose are given in the Appendix.1 Once the subject understands these general instructions, he or she can then be given the Affect Grid together with whatever specific instructions are appropriate, such as "Please rate

[1]  W. Wundt,et al.  An Introduction to Psychology , 1912 .

[2]  S. S. Stevens,et al.  Handbook of experimental psychology , 1951 .

[3]  H. Schlosberg.  The description of facial expressions in terms of two dimensions. , 1952, Journal of experimental psychology.

[4]  H. Schlosberg.  Three dimensions of emotion. , 1954, Psychological review.

[5]  C. Osgood,et al.  The Measurement of Meaning , 1958 .

[6]  E. Duffy,et al.  The psychological significance of the concept of arousal or activation. , 1957, Psychological review.

[7]  C. Osgood.  Dimensionality of the semantic space for communication via facial expressions. , 1966, Scandinavian journal of psychology.

[8]  R. Thayer,et al.  Measurement of Activation through Self-Report , 1967, Psychological reports.

[9]  R. Thayer,et al.  Activation states as assessed by verbal report and four psychophysiological variables. , 1970, Psychophysiology.

[10]  L. E. Bush.  Individual differences multidemensional scaling of adjectives denoting feelings. , 1973, Journal of personality and social psychology.

[11]  J. Russell,et al.  An approach to environmental psychology , 1974 .

[12]  R. Neufeld.  A multidimensional scaling analysis of schizophrenics' and normals' perceptions of verbal similarity. , 1975, Journal of abnormal psychology.

[13]  P. Ekman.  Pictures of Facial Affect , 1976 .

[14]  J. Russell,et al.  Evidence for a three-factor theory of emotions , 1977 .

[15]  R. Thayer.  Toward a psychological theory of multidimensional activation (arousal) , 1978 .

[16]  R. Emde,et al.  Emotional Expression in Infancy: I. Initial Studies of Social Signaling and an Emergent Model , 1978 .

[17]  Michael Lewis,et al.  The Development of affect , 1978 .

[18]  J. Russell.  Evidence of Convergent Validity on the Dimensions of Affect , 1978 .

[19]  J. Russell.  Affective space is bipolar. , 1979 .

[20]  R. Plutchik.  Emotion, a psychoevolutionary synthesis , 1980 .

[21]  J. Russell,et al.  A Description of the Affective Quality Attributed to Environments , 1980 .

[22]  J. Russell.  A circumplex model of affect. , 1980 .

[23]  James H. Steiger,et al.  The structure in persons' implicit taxonomy of emotions. , 1982 .

[24]  C. W. Hughes.  Emotion: Theory, Research and Experience , 1982 .

[25]  J. Russell.  Pancultural Aspects of the Human Conceptual Organization of Emotions , 1983 .

[26]  G. Mandler.  Mind and Body: Psychology of Emotion and Stress , 1984 .

[27]  Matthias Burisch,et al.  You don't always get what you pay for: Measuring depression with short and simple versus long and sophisticated scales. , 1984 .

[28]  E. Diener,et al.  The independence of positive and negative affect. , 1984, Journal of personality and social psychology.

[29]  D. Watson,et al.  Toward a consensual structure of mood. , 1985, Psychological bulletin.

[30]  R. Larsen,et al.  Intensity and frequency: dimensions underlying positive and negative affect. , 1985, Journal of personality and social psychology.

[31]  Lawrence M. Ward,et al.  Planning, mood, and place-liking , 1988 .

[32]  J. Mayer,et al.  The Experience and Meta-Experience of Mood , 1988 .

[33]  C. Martin,et al.  Mood Fluctuations: Women Versus Men and Menstrual Versus Other Cycles , 1988 .

[34]  J. Mayer,et al.  The experience and meta-experience of mood. , 1988, Journal of personality and social psychology.

[35]  D. Watson,et al.  Development and validation of brief measures of positive and negative affect: the PANAS scales. , 1988, Journal of personality and social psychology.

[36]  J. Russell.  MEASURES OF EMOTION , 1989 .

[37]  Janet Metcalfe,et al.  Mood Dependent Memory for Internal Versus External Events , 1989 .

[38]  J. Burgoon,et al.  Nonverbal Communication , 2018, Encyclopedia of Evolutionary Psychological Science.