MEASURES OF EMOTION

Abstract

This chapter is about self-report questionnaires, rating scales, behavioral or physiological indexes, and other measures of emotion that rely, directly or indirectly, on such everyday English words as anger, fear, happiness, anxiety, or stress. These measures are typically constructed and interpreted on the assumption that people use each such word as if it were independent of all other emotion words that are not its synonym. Considerable evidence suggests otherwise: people use emotion words as it they were highly and systematically interrelated. Interpretation of any measure that relies on emotion words requires that we take these interrelationships into account. The key is to realize that saying someone is, for example, anxious is not independent of saying that he or she is happy, sad, etc. Implications of this thesis are discussed for topics such as the use of mood questionnaires in a psychological clinic, research on the causes and consequences of emotion, research on the meaning of facial expressions, and theories of emotion in which labeling is thought to play a central role.