Affect measures

Affect measures (measures of affect or measures of emotion) are used in the study of human affect (including emotions and mood), and refer to measures obtained from self-report studies asking participants to quantify their current feelings or average feelings over a longer period of time. Even though some affect measures contain variations that allow assessment of basic predispositions to experience a certain emotion, tests for such stable traits are usually considered to be personality tests. Scholarly work has noted the problematic nature of using the terms “emotion”, “affect” and “mood” interchangeably. A lack of thorough understanding of these concepts could influence the choice of measures used in assessing the emotional components of interest in a study, leading to a less optimal research result. The differentiation among these key concepts in affect research in the current era is becoming increasingly important, as consistent effort has been made to move out of the stage of using these constructs interchangeably. Affect refers to the mental feeling from inside the body that underlies all emotional experience. It varies in valence (from unpleasant to pleasant) and arousal (from deactivated to activated). While affect is a general term, core affect is one of the fundamental components that constitute a basic emotional unit, what they termed as prototypical emotional episode, as proposed by Russell and Barrett in their seminal work. They suggest that besides core affect, other ingredients such as behavior facial emotional expression are also parts of one emotional unit. Emotion#Differentiation Emotion is a “complex set of interrelated subevents concerned with a specific object”. In other words, emotion is a physical compound constituted by a number of more basic ingredients. This view comes from the psychological constructionist tradition, a more recent and theoretically rich approach. Earlier tradition in the study of human emotion can be broadly divided into two, namely appraisal and basic emotion approach.