Measuring emotions

Question 1

Eliciting emotions

Answer 1

Often done with sound, video, stories, rewards etc in the lab. Functional to know because;
- it’s relevant for mental disorders
- Gives insight to what drives our decisions
- To infer well-being

Question 2

Measuring emotions

Answer 2

Questionnaires:
- Filling out general scales
- Bias sensitive

Introspection
- Where do you feel emotion in your body

Indirect measures:
- Emotional Stroop task

Physiology
- Heart rate, SCR, pupil dilation

Question 3

Specific categories to measure emotions

Answer 3

Infants: emotions are pure and simple

Disorders: Emotions are uncontrolled or extreme

Reactions to emotional stimuli

Record and study expressions

Cross-cultural research (innateness)

Cross-species

Question 4

Models of emotions

Answer 4

There’s no agreement on which emotions are basic and how different emotions are modeled. Most theories have a scale/devide it based on intensity and poliarity;

• No objective measure for basic emotion
• Neuroscience can’t fully dissociate cateories
• Disagreement due to vagueness of language and hierarchies

Question 5

Subjective emotion measures

Answer 5

Dimensions rather that categories to investigate emotions. Due to the vagueness of emotions it’s better to scale it based on eg similarity rating on a dimension.

Eg:
Intensity x pleasentness (Russel)

Ommision x delivery (reward/punish, Roll)

High vs low