Individueller affektiver Raum (Individual affective space)

Abstract

Various disciplines have been attempting to define and measure human emotions for quite some time. Despite numerous models claiming universality in explaining emotions, studies indicate that the perception and processing of emotions are highly individualized, with a putative individualized neural representation in the left insula (Levine et al., 2018). However, it is particularly crucial for psychologists to have the capability to measure an individual’s emotional world. Therefore, in this study we aim to compare three methods that allow one to create representations of an affective space 1) inverse multidimensional scaling (iMDS) using a multi-arrangement task (Kriegeskorte & Mur, 2012), 2) rating scales, and 3) pairwise distance ratings in terms of retest-reliability and representational granularity. Participants will be provided with 25 adjectives from the German version of the Affective Norms for English Words (ANEW) (Bradley & Lang, 1999; Schmidtke et al., 2014). They will be asked to arrange, compare, or rate these adjectives according to the dissimilarity of the emotional reactions they elicit in all of the three methods twice. The study comprises four measurement time points: Before the actual testing of the individual affective space in the laboratory begins, participants will be asked to fill in their demographics to complete several psychological questionnaires online. The psychological questionnaires included in this study are the HEXACO (Ashton & Lee, 2009), Depressivität im nichtklinischen Kontext (Depressiveness in a non-clinical context; Mohr & Müller, 2004), and the Perth Alexithymia Questionnaire PAQ (Kaemmerer et al., 2021; Preece et al., 2018). During the second measurement time point, participants visit the lab to engage in the multi-arrangement task and the pairwise comparison (PC). The third time of measurement starts again with the multi-arrangement task and the PC followed by the scale rating on the Self-Assessment-Manikin (SAM) (Bradley & Lang, 1994). To enhance participants’ compliance with the protocol, participants can choose to perform the fourth appointment either online or in the laboratory. This fourth measurement time point exclusively involves the second scale rating. To ensure consistent conditions for all subjects, participants engaging via an online video communication platform are requested to activate their cameras to control for potential distractors. At the onset of each of the four measurement time points, participants are initially asked to complete the Positive and Negative Affect Schedule PANAS (Breyer & Bluemke, 2016; Watson et al., 1988) to monitor possible changes in affective states due to everyday life factors across the four appointments. After assessing all the three methods twice, dissimilarity matrices (DSMs) are inferred for subsequent analyses. Given that, among the three compared methods, the multi-arrangement task is the sole approach tapping into the spatial nature of similarity representations of mental concepts (Majewska et al., 2020), we assume that it achieves superior results in terms of both retest-reliability and validity compared to scale ratings and PC. Based on the findings, the goal is to develop a reliable method for measuring an individual’s emotional state that is nevertheless sensitive to changes in the individual emotional state (e.g., due to acute psychosocial stress exposure). In the long run, this method may potentially serve as a diagnostic tool for detecting mental illnesses such as depression