Drawing mixed emotions: Sequential or simultaneous experiences?

Abstract

With a view to measuring subjective experience of mixed emotions, we designed an Analogical Emotional Scale (AES). This scale permits the analysis of how, at the subjective level, the emotions evolve from the beginning to the end of the experience, allowing discrimination between simultaneous mixed emotional experiences (i.e., two emotions taking place at the same time) and sequential mixed emotional experiences (i.e., two emotions switching rapidly back and forth). In Study 1 we asked participants to recall a naturally occurring situation, in Study 2 we induced simple vs. mixed emotions in a controlled situation, and in Study 3 we manipulated the structure of emotional stimuli, sequential versus simultaneous. The results showed that the combined use of rating scales and the AES permits us to obtain a more accurate estimation of the actual presence of simultaneous mixed emotional experiences.

This research was supported by Grants PG 06–541A-9–640 (UAM) and SEJ2005–06307/PSIC (MEC) awarded to the first author, and by Grant EX2001–51406136 (MEC) to the second author.

This research was supported by Grants PG 06–541A-9–640 (UAM) and SEJ2005–06307/PSIC (MEC) awarded to the first author, and by Grant EX2001–51406136 (MEC) to the second author.

Acknowledgments

We thank Jack Brehm, James Russell, Dolores Albarracín, José Fernández-Dols and the associate editor and reviewers for very helpful comments on early versions of this article; Susana Sariego and David Weston for their help in the preparation of the English version; and Marta Gacitúa and Alejandra Hurtado for their help in the collection of data.

Notes

This research was supported by Grants PG 06–541A-9–640 (UAM) and SEJ2005–06307/PSIC (MEC) awarded to the first author, and by Grant EX2001–51406136 (MEC) to the second author.

¹There is another model, based on different logic, which denies the possibility of feeling two opposite emotions at the same time: Brehm's (1999) deterrence model. For this author, “The reason in my theory for assuming that only one emotion can occur at a time is because the system can only do one thing at a time; namely, to be angry or be happy or whatever. Nevertheless, when one emotion is strong, so there is no question about what controls one's system, then a weaker co-existent emotion could occur because it would be no threat to control” (personal communication, 7 November 7 2002).

²With respect to the effect of gender, overall, men and women reported quite similar intensities for each emotion: Ms = 4.7 vs. 4.5 and 2.7 vs. 2.3 for happiness and sadness, respectively; and 1.7 vs. 0.9, 1.3 vs. 1.3, 0.1 vs. 0.1, and 2.7 vs. 2.3 for surprise, calm, anger and tension, respectively. There was only one significant difference: women reported a significantly higher intensity of surprise, t(150) = 2.00, p<.05, but in both cases the means were very low.

³As a previous reviewer argued, the AES may be biased against findings of simultaneity because the non-simultaneous weather example (i.e., “it started to rain a lot but it ended up easing off until the sun started to shine slightly”) is more frequent or representative than the simultaneous one (i.e., “it was raining a little for a long time while the sun was shining intensely”). In order to test this possibility, we designed a new questionnaire identical to that used in Study 1, except in one aspect: the non-simultaneous and simultaneous weather examples were equally frequent or representative (i.e., “it started to rain a lot but it ended up easing off, then the wind started to blow more and more intensely” vs. “it was raining a little for a long time while the wind was blowing intensely”). First, an independent group of 30 judges rated the co-occurrence of rain and wind as highly probable (a mean value of 4.03 on a 5-point scale). Second, we asked a different group of 55 participants to fill out the new questionnaire, and the results replicated the significant decrease obtained in Study 1: while 51% of participants marked both happiness and sadness on the digital scale, 31% represented the emotional experience on the AES as simultaneous; p<.002, as assessed by the McNemar test.

⁴To avoid suggesting the emotion that it was appropriate to feel, we omitted from the Williams and Aaker (2002) versions of the happy, sad and mixed ads the following sentences: “It is a happy and exhilarating time”; “It is a sad and nostalgic time”; “It is such a sad and a happy time”, respectively.

⁵Only 1 of the 34 participants represented an emotional flow that was clearly in contrast to the sadness–happiness structure, drawing that the experience started with happiness prevailing over sadness and finished with sadness prevailing over happiness. The other 9 participants drew representations that neither supported nor rejected the sadness–happiness structure.