Methods for the Science of

Emotion
ASST. PROF. EMİNE İNAN
Manipulating Emotions

 Have you ever scared anyone intentionally?

 Did it work?

 If you replicate it, will it work again?

 What if others?
Manipulating Emotions

 In order to conduct research on human emotions, affective scientists attempt to create

replicable experiments in the laboratory to induce emotional states.

 They also try to measure emotions—both inside and outside of the laboratory.

 Today;
 How do they elicit and measure emotions reliably?
Manipulating Emotions

 Reasons of manipulation;
 To test predictions of a specific theory of emotion.
 E.g. which facial expressions or physiological changes co-occur with a particular self-
reported emotion.
 First find a method of inducing the emotion or emotions of interest.
 Elicit those states in a large number of experimental participants.
 Measure the self-reported, expressive, and physiological components of the resulting states.
 Then confirm your predictions about how people facially express, say, disgust or fear.
Manipulating Emotions

 Reasons of manipulation;
 In order to test whether that state reliably causes a particular behavior.
 E.g. increases in eating or helping behaviors
 After eliciting an emotion in the laboratory, the researcher could give participants the opportunity to eat
and measure the amount they consume.
 They might want to study how emotions influence cognitive behaviors.
 reasoning or decision making
 Here again the researcher could induce an emotion
 Then invite participants to solve moral dilemmas or evaluate risks of solutions to hypothetical problems.
Manipulating Emotions
Ethical Guidelines

 Affective scientists cannot do anything they please to elicit emotions in experimental

settings.
 They are required to conform to a set of ethical guidelines (APA)
 Scientists should not create a situation in which the intensity of participants’ emotions
surpasses those that they typically experience in daily life.
 Experimentally induced emotions should be prompted by experiences that are, or are likely to
be, encountered in everyday life rather than by very unusual interventions.
 The emotions should be extinguishable—particularly if they are negative or painful—and
alleviated before the participant leaves the laboratory.
 The importance of debriefing to alleviate the effects of emotion inductions has been well
documented.
Manipulating Emotions
Ethical Guidelines

 The researcher, Ax (1953), wanted to find out whether anger and fear were characterized by
specific patterns of autonomic nervous system activity.
 Hooked participants up to a number of devices, such as an electric shock generator.
 Then, as their autonomic nervous system indicators were being recorded, for some of the participants Ax
staged a malfunction of the shock generator; the generator spewed sparks, and the experimenter became
overtly distressed.
 Predictably, the participants experienced high levels of fear.
 Participants who had been assigned to an anger condition were scolded for five minutes by a rude
polygraph operator.
 This treatment indeed elicited high levels of anger.
 In fact, Ax (1953) found relative specificity in the patterns of participants’ autonomic nervous system
activity.
Manipulating Emotions
Ethical Guidelines

 Landis’ facial expressions experiment (1924)

 If different emotions lead to unique facial expressions
 Participants were university students and experiment was conducted in a lab.
 The subjects were made to smell ammonia, to look at pornography, and to put their hands into a
bucket of frogs. But final part was the controversial part.
 The participants were told to cut the head of a live rat with a knife. As they did not know how to
do this in proper way many rats suffered.
 For those who did not applied the instructions the researcher cut off the heads of the rats.
 Researcher could not prove that there are sets of facial expressions for specific emotions.
Manipulating Emotions
Affective Images—The International Affective Picture System

neutral
 Some research requires that many brief emotional reactions
high arousal
are elicited in a single participant throughout an positive
experimental session.
 For instance, a researcher might be interested in how
attention is allocated to information that causes feelings of
joy versus feelings of fear.
 The International Affective Picture System (IAPS,
pronounced eye-aps) is a set of emotion-inducing images.
 Over half of the IAPS images contain scenes involving
human beings in interactions.
 The remaining images contain animals, objects, or
scenes that do not contain humans.

high arousal
negative
Manipulating Emotions
Affective Images—The International Affective Picture
System

 Research has investigated emotional responses to the IAPS images with measures of skin
conductance, cardiovascular response, and neural electrophysiology.

 The IAPS images were developed in order to allow researchers all over the world to
reliably elicit affective responses.

 By using the exact same images, researchers can then compare and even replicate each
other’s work.
Manipulating Emotions
Recall of Emotional Memories

 Whereas some research questions require the scientist to produce a brief emotional
reaction, as with the IAPS, other research questions require that a more prolonged
emotional reaction be induced in experimental participants.
 One way experimenters in the laboratory induce emotional states that last longer than a
few seconds is to ask participants to get active in the process of experiencing emotion.
 In the recall method for inducing emotions, participants are instructed to retrieve
memories of events that they experienced personally and to relive the emotion they felt.
Manipulating Emotions
Recall of Emotional Memories

 Strack, Schwarz, and Geschneidinger (1985) and Schwarz and Clore (1983) systematically
investigated the retrieval of emotional memories to induce emotional states in the laboratory.
 The way in which the memory is retrieved determines whether an emotion is felt.
 Specifically, they demonstrated that the retrieval of emotional memories in a pallid way—a way that
does not focus on the emotional parts of the experience but still accurately describes the situation—
does not reactivate the original emotion.
 On the other hand, a retrieval that involves attention to the vivid emotional aspects of the situation
tends to reactivate the original emotion.
 This is an important demonstration because it shows that we are not obliged to re-experience an
entire emotional event each time that we think back about it.
 The way that we think about it influences the impact that memory has on our present emotional state.
Manipulating Emotions
Films

 A third method for eliciting emotions in the laboratory is to show participants short films
or film segments—even from well-known movies—

 How we know which films produce which emotions?

 Researchers must always study the emotional effects of the method before using it in an
experiment.
Manipulating Emotions
Films

 Philippot (1993) conducted a study of the emotional impact of a number of film segments.
 The segments lasted between three and six minutes and were selected to generate five
different emotions (anger, disgust, sadness, happiness, and fear) and a neutral state in the
viewer.
 Participants watched each clip and reported how it made them feel on a self-report
questionnaire.
 Results showed that the movies provoked very specific emotions in most individuals.
 For example, the segments preselected to induce joy did induce joy quite specifically and more
so than any other emotion.
 Gross and Levenson (1995)
Manipulating Emotions
Music

 Music also causes people to feel emotions and can be used to elicit certain emotions in
the laboratory.
 At first, you might think that the reason a specific song causes a very individual
emotional state in a particular person is because, for him or her, that music is associated
with a very personal emotional event or period of their life.
 Maybe you fell in love for the first time when a particular song was popular on the radio.
You now associate the song with that time of being in love, and so the song always
produces a particular feeling (either joy or perhaps sadness) in you.
 If the effects of music were this specific to each person, then it would be labor intensive
to manipulate emotion with music.
Manipulating Emotions
Music

 More often, researchers rely on general—rather than idiosyncratic—effects of music on

people’s experience of emotion.
 And these effects of music on emotion seem to be quite basic, at least in Western cultures.
 E.g. Dissonant (compared to consonant) bichords are perceived as unstable, furious, and tense.
 As a consequence, a piece of music with many dissonant chords will likely make the listener feel
somewhat anxious.
 E.g. people tend to perceive minor chords as sadder and gloomier than major chords,
 E.g. high-pitched tones are associated with positive emotions, whereas low-pitched tones tend to
express negative emotions.
 E.g. Slow tempos tend to Express low-arousal emotions, whereas fast tempos are associated with
high-arousal emotional states.
 1st example 2 nd example
Manipulating Emotions
Music

 Music has been shown to influence emotion as indexed by self-report, physiological

reactions, activity in the brain, and facial expression of emotion.

 However, the emotions elicited by music may not correspond to the basic emotions.

 Some researchers have demonstrated that music induces subtle states that are described by
language that refers to nuanced feelings such as sensual, spiritual, radiant, and meditative.
Manipulating Emotions
Scripted Social Interaction

 Involve a cover story (deception) about the experimental hypothesis and the use of a
scripted social interaction involving the experimenter or fake participant (a confederate)
who is working with the experimenter.

 Scripted social interactions to induce emotions in the laboratory are particularly useful
when the emotion under study is difficult to elicit with images, films, and music and when
a very realistic state is desired.
 E.g. anger, fear, guilt, and shame
Manipulating Emotions
Scripted Social Interaction

 Guilt, an emotion that is difficult to induce with films, music, or images, has also been induced with scripted
interaction.
 E.g. Brock and Becker (1966) famously designed an apparatus rigged so that when participants pressed buttons on
it as instructed, it appeared that they had inadvertently caused a low or a high amount of damage to the device.
 In the high damage condition, specifically designed to induce guilt, the apparatus suddenly made a loud noise and produced
clouds of thick white smoke.
 To add to the guilt, the experimenter said, “What happened? I’ll never get my master’s now. What did you do to the machine?
Well, I guess that ends the experiment. The machine is broken”
 Manipulation checks have shown that these scripted interactions are effective elicitors of guilt in the laboratory and the field.
 ??Guilt or Shame??
 As can be seen scripted interaction inductions of emotions are useful for eliciting strong and complex
emotions.
 However, they are often very time consuming for research personnel and usually require a high level of
social coordination and training.
Manipulating Emotions
Naturally Occurring Emotions

 Another way to conduct research on emotions is to examine the behaviors of individuals

who are experiencing different states naturally due to events in their lives.
 There are at least two ways to use naturally occurring emotions to study emotion
processes.
 One is to find groups of people who have a strong probability of all being in a similar and
predictable emotional state (because of the consensual meaning of the situation in that culture)
and compare them to people in another situation who are feeling little emotion or something
different.
 The second is to measure ongoing emotion in the laboratory or in daily life using online
assessments and relate their reported emotions to the behavior of interest.
Manipulating Emotions
Induction Methods Are Not All the Same

 How to decide which method?

 Experimental demand
 Standardization
 Complexity
 Ecological validity
Manipulating Emotions
Induction Methods Are Not All the Same

 Experimental demand
 Refers to how easy it is for experimental participants to guess what a study is
designed to test.
 Experimental demand is high if the participant can very easily guess, and this is
undesirable in cases in which the participant is motivated and able to change their
behavior in order to either help or hurt the experimenter.
 Exposure to clearly happy or sad films, images, or music can seem to participants like
obvious attempts to manipulate mood or emotional response.
Manipulating Emotions
Induction Methods Are Not All the Same

 Experimental demand
 Further, a link between the induction of emotion and the dependent variable may also be
obvious:
 İf the participant is exposed to a happy movie and is then asked to complete a measure of
psychological well-being, the participant might easily conclude that the experiment concerns the
effects of happiness on self-reports of well-being.
 If participants guess the expectations of the experimenter, they may alter their behavior, thereby
compromising the validity of the study.
 To avoid such influences, researchers use a cover story to mask the true purpose of the study.
 E.g. sometimes they simply assert that the two parts of the study (the task that includes the emotion
induction and the task that measures the dependent variable) are not related or constitute two separate
studies.
Manipulating Emotions
Induction Methods Are Not All the Same

 Standardization
 is the extent to which the method to induce emotions has been pilot-tested for effectiveness and
reliability across people and contexts.
 The IAPS images were specifically developed for use with participants of many ages and from
many countries.
 The films listed before have also been extensively pilot-tested and used in subsequent research,
making them somewhat better standardized than other induction methods such as music and
scripted interaction.
Manipulating Emotions
Induction Methods Are Not All the Same

 Complexity and ecological validity

 Complexity refers to invoking many components of the emotion in the laboratory experience,
 Ecological validity is the extent to which the experience is similar to what might be experienced in daily
life.
 The emotional experience in the laboratory is influenced and sometimes constrained by the methods being
used by the experimenter.
 E.g. when participants are lying in a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scanner observing IAPS slides, the
complexity and ecological validity of the emotional response must be viewed as limited.
 Not only do the slides not produce a complex state, but the fact that the participant may not move limits the extent to
which the body can be involved in the experience of the emotional response.
 Presenting IAPS images in an MRI scanner, therefore, can be said to be a model of some real-life emotional
experiences, but not all.
Measuring Emotions

 Emotions have many components.

 Measuring emotion also requires that the experimenter endorse a particular theory of
emotion and try to assess the component or components of emotion specified by the
theory.
 There are five types of measures that assess different components of emotion
 Each measure does not assess emotions to the same degree of specificity.
 Some measure the dimensions of “core affect” (valence and activation), and others measure
more discrete emotional states.
Measuring Emotions
Questionnaires

 1 (not at all) to 10 (very much)

 Because the numerical assessments in Likert and Likert-type responses can be converted
into words (not at all, a little, moderate, etc.), such questionnaires are called verbal
measure.
 Questionnaires with nonverbal formats, in which not words but pictures represent feeling
states, have also been developed to measure conscious subjective feeling states.
Measuring Emotions
Questionnaires

 One of the most often-used instruments for measuring global (or “core”) affect is the Positive and Negative Affect
Schedule (PANAS; Watson, Clark, & Tellegen, 1988).
 The Multiple Affect Adjective Checklist—Revised (MAAC-R; Zuckerman & Lubin, 1985), the Current Mood
Questionnaire (Feldman Barrett & Russell, 1998), and the Brief Mood Introspection Scale (BMIS; Mayer &
Gaschke, 1988) are other instruments that can also be used to measure general positive and negative affect and high
and low aroused states.
 In contrast, the Differential Emotions Scale (Izard et al., 1974) was developed to measure discrete emotional states.
 The scale lists words that belong to 10 emotion categories: interest, joy, sadness, anger, fear, anxiety, disgust, scorn, surprise,
and happiness.
 The Self-Assessment Manikin (SAM) is an instrument designed to measure the valence and arousal components of
affect using nonverbal scales (Bradley & Lang, 1994).
 An advantage of the SAM, and indeed any nonverbal measure of emotion, is that it can be used to measure affect in both
children and adults.
 In addition, because SAM is a language-free measurement, it can be used across countries and cultures.
Measuring Emotions
Facial Expression

 French physiologist Guillaume-Benjamin Duchenne de Boulogne (1862/1990)

 Investigated how different combinations of facial muscles contribute to producing
different expressions of emotion.
 Duchenne de Boulogne induced the contraction of facial muscles with the use of electric
currents and took photographs of the resulting expressions.
 These days, affective scientists who use component methods rely on objective coding
systems that were inspired in part by Duchenne de Boulogne’s observations.
Measuring Emotions
Facial Expression

 Ekman and Friesen (1978) developed the widely used, anatomically based coding system, the
Facial Action Coding Scheme (FACS).
 FACS measures the appearance of changes in the face caused by muscular movements.
 Facial expressions are described by a combination of action units (AU).
 There are 44 AUs, which singly or in combination, account for all visible and distinguishable facial
muscle movements.
 FACS scoring requires the careful observation of the contraction of facial muscles as well as the
intensity of the contraction.
 Because FACS coding is so time consuming, computer-assisted FACS coding software has also been
developed.
 The Computer Expression Recognition Toolbox (CERT) is one such measure of visible facial mimicry.
 FAST-FACS, which was specifically developed for emotion researchers, is another software tool available for
computer-assisted FACS coding.
Measuring Emotions
Central Nervous System

 The nervous system is traditionally divided into two parts.

 Central and peripheral nervous systems
 The central nervous system (CNS), which includes the brain and the spinal cord, plays an important
role in our emotional responding.
 Scientists who study the neural bases of emotion look for neural biomarkers for emotional
experience and expression.
 This means that they look for the systems of the brain that occur at the same time as an emotional event, such
as a reaction to the sight of two puppies playing.
 Another way to say this is that they are looking for correlations between events in the brain and emotional
responding.
 Electroencephalography and neuroimaging methods—in particular, functional magnetic resonance
imaging—are two measures that have been developed to assess emotion processes in the CNS.
Measuring Emotions
Central Nervous System

 Electroencephalography (EEG)
 EEG can assess activation in larger regions of the brain such as the anterior (i.e.,
front) versus posterior (i.e., back) and/or the left hemisphere versus right hemisphere.
 Researchers have used EEG to test some hypotheses about the role of the different
hemispheres of the brain in generating positive and negative emotions.
 Scientists also use EEG measures to assess the timing of responses to a perceived
emotional object, usually called an “event”.
Measuring Emotions
Central Nervous System

 Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI)

 Functional MRI takes an image of the brain while the brain is working (performing a function).
 When a part of the brain is in use, blood oxygenation and flow to that region increase.
 The fMRI of the brain detects blood oxygenation and blood flow changes.
 Based on the scans, activation maps are computed, showing which parts of the brain are involved
(statistically activated) in solving a particular task or making a particular judgment.
 Because fMRI is relatively imprecise in mapping subcortical, and especially brainstem, regions (which are
small and lie deep in the brain), this technique is most effectively used to better understand the roles of
cortical regions in emotions.
 Because cortical regions are important for executive functions, fMRI has been most informative in studies
of the regulation of emotion rather than the discovery of biomarkers for emotion.
 The regulation and inhibition of emotion are thought to be driven by the prefrontal cortex, which is easier
to visualize in fMRI.
Measuring Emotions
Peripheral Nervous System

 The peripheral nervous system (PNS) lies outside of the brain and spinal cord and
includes the cranial nerves, the spinal nerves, and the autonomic nerves.

 These nerves connect the CNS to sensory organs, such as the eyes and ears, and to other
organs of the body, as well as to muscles, blood vessels, and glands.

 The PNS can be further broken down into the somatic and autonomic nervous systems.
Measuring Emotions
Peripheral Nervous System

 The somatic nervous system (SNS) functions to innervate skeletal muscles, including those of the
face, that are under voluntary control.
 We rely on our SNS when we execute plans to make the movements that are necessary to walk, run,
get dressed, and pick up a coffee cup or a cell phone.
 The autonomic nervous system (ANS), in contrast, supports automatic functions of the body.
 E.g. the ANS regulates the internal balance of your body when you are faced with changing circumstances
and adjusting innervation of smooth muscles—such as the heart— and glands.
 The ANS is further divided into the sympathetic nervous system and the parasympathetic nervous
system.
 Whereas the sympathetic nervous system functions to prepare the body for action, the
parasympathetic nervous system has restorative functions.
 These functions are sometimes called the “fight or flight” and the “rest and digest” systems, respectively.
Measuring Emotions
Peripheral Nervous System

 Most researchers who study the physiology of emotion try to measure ANS responses because they
are interested in automatic emotional responses.
 Most aspects of physiology, such as heart rate, are recorded by placing sensors on the surface of the
skin.
 Because of the use of sensors and the fact that an experimenter must place them on the participant,
physiological recording is considered an intrusive procedure.
 Which means the participant knows that something is being measured and that the measurement technique
might be experienced as stressful or uncomfortable.
 There are two exceptions to the use of sensors, and those are measures of pupillary response and
eye blinks.
 These two responses can be assessed with eye tracking devices, although sometimes eye blinks are also
measured with electrodes.
Measuring Emotions
Peripheral Nervous System

 Because the ANS controls automatic reactions—things outside of a person’s

control—it is considered an accurate measure of “raw” emotion.

 However, so far no physiological biomarkers for the basic emotions (perhaps

other than fear and anger) have been identified.

 Rather, researchers study physiological indicators to learn about other aspects of

emotion such as novelty, intensity, and valence.
Measuring Emotions
Assessment Methods Are Not All the Same

 Methods for measuring emotions do not all accomplish exactly the same thing.
 What to consider while choosing the measurement method?
 Language-based
 Subjective versus objective
 Measuring discrete or more global states of emotion
 Invasive
 Expensive
Measuring Emotions
Assessment Methods Are Not All the Same

 Language-based measurements include self-report scales.

 Some researchers believe that self-report is the “gold standard” for measuring emotions.
 The thinking is “if you want to know how someone is feeling, just ask them!” (Barrett, 2004).
 However, there are also problems with self-report using words for emotion.
1) These measures are open to experimental demand: If you ask me how I am feeling, I may arrange my
answers to suit you the experimenter (e.g., tell you what you want to hear) or to suit me (e.g., perhaps I
don’t want to admit how I am feeling).
2) Language-based measures might not be useful or possible with younger children because they might
not understand the words.
3) Translations to other languages are always possible for cross-cultural research. But translating emotion
words is very difficult and open to many types of errors that might make the research findings
misleading.
Measuring Emotions
Assessment Methods Are Not All the Same

 Self-reports of emotion are also subjective.

 They are thus vulnerable to a number of reporting biases.
 E.g it takes attention to decide if one is having an emotion, and maybe you don’t have the inclination or the
capacity to pay attention to your emotions at the time you are asked.
 Indeed, many methods for measuring emotion are not useful for quantifying specific emotions such as
anger, guilt, and disgust.
 Some self-report questionnaires can be used to derive scores for specific emotions (including the basic
emotions).
 However, physiological and neural biomarkers for the basic emotions have not been conclusively found.
 When trying to measure emotions objectively, therefore, the best strategy is to measure many
components of emotion, including facial expression, physiology, and even behavior.
Measuring Emotions
Assessment Methods Are Not All the Same

 Another problem is that many of the objective measures are both invasive and expensive.
 How would you like to be hooked up to electrodes on your chest, head, or other part of the body?
 Such invasiveness can affect how much emotion is produced by an emotion induction method and
even which emotion is likely to be elicited.
 Although MRI scanners allow for some progress toward identifying complex neural circuitry for
specific emotions, they are constraining and uncomfortable.
 And the collection and analysis of MRI scans are very expensive.
 In sum, there are many ways to measure the components of emotion.
 As with selecting a method to induce an emotion, the researcher must start with a theory of emotion
and select measurement methods that assess the parts of emotion that the theory was intended to
explain.