Sliding into happiness: A new tool for measuring affective responses to words.

Abstract

Reliable measurement of affective responses is critical for research into human emotion. Affective evaluation of words is most commonly gauged on multiple dimensions—including valence (positivity) and arousal—using a rating scale. Despite its popularity, this scale is open to criticism: it generates ordinal data that is often misinterpreted as interval, it does not provide the fine resolution that is essential by recent theoretical accounts of emotion, and its extremes may not be properly calibrated. In five experiments, we introduce a new slider tool for affective evaluation of words on a continuous, well-calibrated and high-resolution scale. In Experiment 1, participants were shown a word and asked to move a manikin representing themselves closer to or farther away from the word. The manikin’s distance from the word strongly correlated with the word’s valence. In Experiment 2, individual differences in shyness and sociability elicited reliable differences in distance from the words. Experiment 3 validated the results of Experiments 1 and 2 using a demographically more diverse population of responders. Finally, Experiment 4 (along with Experiment 2) suggested that task demand is not a potential cause for scale recalibration. In Experiment 5, men and women placed a manikin closer or farther from words that showed sex differences in valence, highlighting the sensitivity of this measure to group differences. These findings shed a new light on interactions among affect, language, and individual differences, and demonstrate the utility of a new tool for measuring word affect.

Emotional reactivity and perspective-taking in individuals with and without severe depressive symptoms

“…In all conditions, greater word valence came with a shorter distance between the manikin and the word. In line with all prior reports 27 , 28 , positive emotion is associated with an approach behaviour. However, marked differences were observed both across groups and across experimental conditions in how strongly the range of positivity influenced responses to words.…”

“…Our data offer a clear demonstration of the latter hypothesis, in support of a notion that an across-the-board flattening of affect is symptomatic of depression 3 . On the other hand, and consistent with previous research with the slider paradigm, participants without depression were strongly effected by valence and used the entire range of the slider scale in response to valence when moving a neutral manikin 27 , 28 .…”

“…Warriner et al . 27 have found that the affective ratings from this task, when the referent was the participant, strongly correlated with affective ratings from a Likert scale, while 28 have demonstrated that the slider task is a reliable measure of valence for words both within and across individuals. The benefit of the slider method, compared to the ratings method, is that we can easily change the referent for the affective ratings, asking people to rate the emotion of words for someone who is not themselves.…”

“…An experimental paradigm that enables us to pursue these hypotheses within-subjects is that of a slider task 27 . The task consists of a scale and a humanoid manikin.…”

Scoring best-worst data in unbalanced many-item designs, with applications to crowdsourcing semantic judgments

“…There are at least two reasons why the above critique should not be a point of concern for the present experiment. First, the possibility of recalibration in valence decisions when using the dimensional anchors of pleasant and unpleasant was explicitly tested by Warriner, Shore, Schmidt, Imbault, and Kuperman (2017). They found no evidence that words with middling valences were judged to be more extreme at the beginning of a data collection session.…”