Valence focus and arousal focus: Individual differences in the structure of affective experience.

Feldman, Lisa A.

doi:10.1037/0022-3514.69.1.153

Cited by 395 publications

(362 citation statements)

References 57 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

334

Contrasting

Unclassified

Order By: Relevance

“…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).…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 95%

Valence Focus and the Perception of Facial Affect.

Barrett¹,

Niedenthal²

2004

Emotion

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Individuals differ in the extent to which they emphasize feelings of pleasure or displeasure in their verbal reports of emotional experience, an individual difference termed valence focus (VF). This multimethod study indicates that VF is linked to heightened efficiency in perceptual processing of affective stimuli. Individuals higher in VF (i.e., who emphasized feelings of pleasure/displeasure in reports of emotional experiences) were more sensitive to changes in negative facial expressions than individuals lower in VF. The effect was not accounted for by current affective state or other personality characteristics. Implications for the validity of self-reported experienced emotion are discussed.Valence is a basic property of affect (Russell & Feldman Barrett, 1999). When reporting their experience, individuals differ in the extent to which they emphasize this property, reflecting individual differences in valence focus (VF;Feldman, 1995;, 2004. For example, the word tired, defined as unpleasant and low in arousal, can be used to communicate feeling sleepy (emphasizing low arousal), annoyed and miserable (emphasizing the unpleasantness), or fatigued (emphasizing both low arousal and displeasure). An individual high in VF uses emotion adjectives primarily to communicate pleasure and displeasure, whereas someone low in VF does this less so and uses emotion adjectives to communicate other properties of feelings as well. The measurement of VF is implicit because participants are not asked directly about their attention to pleasure and displeasure. Rather, VF is defined as the extent to which participants focus on the pleasant or unpleasant property of the adjectives when making self-reports of experienced emotion.At a conceptual level, it is assumed that differential emphasis on valence during the self-report process reflects differential experience of pleasure and displeasure. A reasonable hypothesis is that people differ in their sensitivity to valenced information in the environment and, as a result, differ in the intensity and frequency of experienced pleasure and displeasure. Differential experience leads to differential word use, resulting in VF. Perceptual Sensitivity to Valenced InformationWe examined the link between VF and perceptual sensitivity to valenced information by relying on a "morph movies" task (Niedenthal, Brauer, Halberstadt, & Innes-Ker, 2001; Niedenthal, Brauer, Robin, & Innes-Ker, 2002; Niedenthal, Halberstadt, Margolin, & InnesKer, 2000). In the present version of the task, participants played 100-frame computerized movies in which a face displaying a neutral expression gradually changed to display a clear emotional expression (either angry, sad, or happy). The participants used a computerized mouse to control the speed with which each movie played and to stop each movie at the point where, for the first time, an emotional expression appeared on the face (i.e., the onset point).The morph movies task was useful for studying the link between VF and perceptual sensitivity to valenced ...

show abstract

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 95%

Valence Focus and the Perception of Facial Affect.

Barrett¹,

Niedenthal²

2004

Emotion

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…If attention to emotional experience influences emotion language, then the structure of emotion language will look different after experience sampling than it did before. This was not the case, however.Second, as in past research (Feldman, 1995a;Feldman Barrett, 1998), people differed in the extent to which they emphasized valence-and arousal-based information in their verbal reports of emotional experience. Some people reported their feelings with more pleasure and displeasure than did others.…”

mentioning

confidence: 80%

“…Each participant's P-correlation matrix can be factor analyzed; the first two unrotated factors extracted are typically valence and arousal, and the size of each factor represents the variance in the self-report ratings accounted for by each property. The factor-analytic estimates of valence focus and arousal focus, although strongly related to the more externally based estimates (Feldman, 1995a;Feldman Barrett, 1998), are less optimal because they contain the usual ambiguities associated with factor analysis (such as factor identification). resulting indices are themselves correlation coefficients, they too were subjected to a Fisher's r-to-z transformation before being used in further analyses.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

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

Barrett

2004

Journal of Personality and Social Psychology

354

318

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

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...

show abstract

“…9 An inspection of the solution suggested that one axis corresponded to the arousal denoted by the affect terms, and the other corresponded to valence. The congruence coefficients for this solution and those used in Study 1 (taken from Feldman, 1995) were .94 for the arousal dimension and .92 for the valence dimension. This group solution produced the arousal-based semantic distance matrix used to compute AF.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 96%

“…: The external criterion that we used to compute AF was based on the cognitive structure of emotion language. The structure used here was derived from a previously published multidimensional scaling (MDS) solution of similarity judgments for the same 16 emotion-related words used to compute the pcorrelation matrices (Feldman, 1995). Similarity judgments for emotion-related words, when subjected to an MDS analysis, routinely yield valence and arousal dimensions that represent the basic, semantic properties contained in our knowledge about those words and the concepts they represent.…”

Section: Estimating Arousal Focusmentioning

confidence: 99%

Interoceptive Sensitivity and Self-Reports of Emotional Experience.

Barrett¹,

Quigley²,

Bliss‐Moreau³

et al. 2004

Journal of Personality and Social Psychology

344

258

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

People differ in the extent to which they emphasize feelings of activation or deactivation in their verbal reports of experienced emotion, termed arousal focus (AF). Two multimethod studies indicate that AF is linked to heightened interoceptive sensitivity (as measured by performance on a heartbeat detection task). People who were more sensitive to their heartbeats emphasized feelings of activation and deactivation when reporting their experiences of emotion over time more than did those who were less sensitive. This relationship was not accounted for by several other variables, including simple language effects. Implications for the role of interoception in experienced emotion and the validity of self-reported emotion are discussed.Arousal is a basic property of all affective judgments (for a recent review, see Russell & Feldman Barrett, 1999) and is ubiquitous in models of emotion (e.g.,

show abstract

Valence focus and arousal focus: Individual differences in the structure of affective experience.

Cited by 395 publications

References 57 publications

Valence Focus and the Perception of Facial Affect.

Valence Focus and the Perception of Facial Affect.

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

Interoceptive Sensitivity and Self-Reports of Emotional Experience.

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About