Feelings or Words? Understanding the Content in Self-Report Ratings of Experienced Emotion.

Abstract

People differ in the extent to which their verbal reports of experienced emotion are valence focused or arousal focused. Three multimethod studies are reported to explore whether differential focus reflects individual differences in the cognitive structure of emotion language versus differences in phenomenological experience. Although there was some evidence that valence focus and arousal focus were linked to variations differences in cognitive structure, the findings are also consistent with the view that self-report ratings are being driven by the properties of the feelings that are being reported. Implications for the study of experienced emotion are discussed.People report how they feel using words. In everyday life, when we want to know how someone is feeling, we ask. "How are you feeling?" is one of the most ubiquitous questions in our culture. Likewise, for over half a century, psychologists have relied on self-reports to find out how people feel, and for good reason. Decades of behavioral, cognitive, and psychophysiological research have failed to provide clear and consistent measures that unambiguously correspond to the categories of experienced emotion that are found in Western cultures (e.g., anger, sadness, fear): There are neither distinct autonomic footprints for categories of emotion (Cacioppo, Berntson, Larsen, Poehlmann, & Ito, 2000) nor direct connections between the experience of these emotions and facial movements that are perceived as coordinated "expressions" (Russell, Bachorowski, & Fernández-Dols, 2003). 1 As a result, there is no known objective, external measure of the subjective, internal events that we experience as anger, sadness, fear, and so on. If we want to know whether people feel these emotions, we have to ask them.When self-reports are treated as verbal behaviors that can be observed and studied, people use the same emotion words in very different ways to communicate their feelings. For example, the word tired, which is generally understood to refer to a state that is unpleasant and low in arousal, can be used to communicate a feeling of sleepiness (emphasizing the low arousal property), annoyance and misery (as in "I am tired of this," emphasizing the unpleasantness), or fatigued (emphasizing both low arousal and displeasure properties). A key question facing researchers is whether differences in self-report ratings of experienced emotion reflect differences in actual feelings or merely reflect differences in the way that people understand the words that are used in the rating process. One way to address the question of whether selfreports reflect feelings or language is to examine the granularity in such reports. When asked to report how they feel, some individuals represent their experiences with a good deal of precision (high granularity), whereas others represent their experiences in more global terms (low granularity, primarily in terms of pleasure or displeasure). This article examines whether Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Lisa F...

Emodiversity and the emotional ecosystem.

“…Emotional granularity is the degree to which a person can verbally characterize emotional experiences with precision (Barrett, 1998(Barrett, , 2004Barrett, Gross, Christensen, & Benvenuto, 2001;Feldman, 1995;Tugade, Fredrickson, & Barrett, 2004). People high in emotional granularity tend to experience emotions in a discrete and differentiated fashion; that is, they experience one particular emotion rather than a mix of different emotions at a given time.…”

Valence Focus and the Perception of Facial Affect.

“…The dimensions represent the agreed-upon attributed or properties of the words (Davison, 1983). Coefficients of congruence with other solutions (depicting a cognitive structure for the same words derived from a different sample of similarity ratings; Feldman, 1995;Feldman Barrett, 2004, Study 2) were above .90, indicating that the valence-arousal structure replicated at a group level. These findings replicated previous findings that emotion-related adjectives can be necessarily (but not sufficiently) defined in terms of the valence and the level of arousal they denote (Kring, Feldman Barrett, & Gard, 2003;Russell & Feldman Barrett, 1999).…”

Bayesian Data Analysis with the Bivariate Hierarchical Ornstein-Uhlenbeck Process Model

“…In such study participants (commonly more than 20) are semirandomly prompted for example through a mobile app to report their arousal (activation) and valence (pleasantness) levels at the moment of the prompt, during their everyday life. This integral blend of pleasure and arousal is often labeled as core affect (Russell, 2003) in the emotion literature, and change over time in terms of self-reported core affect has been the focus of several studies (see, e.g., Barrett, 2004;Kuppens, Tuerlinckx, Russell, & Barrett, 2013). Recently, neural correlates of core affect has also been found (Wilson-Mendenhall, Barrett, & Barsalou, 2013).…”