Differential predictability of four dimensions of affect intensity

Abstract

Individual differences in affect intensity are typically assessed with the Affect Intensity Measure (AIM). Previous factor analyses suggest that the AIM is comprised of four weakly correlated factors: Positive Affectivity, Negative Reactivity, Negative Intensity and Positive Intensity or Serenity. However, little data exist to show whether its four factors relate to other measures differently enough to preclude use of the total scale score. The present study replicated the four-factor solution and found that subscales derived from the four factors correlated differently with criterion variables that assess personality domains, affective dispositions, and cognitive patterns that are associated with emotional reactions. The results show that use of the total AIM score can obscure relationships between specific features of affect intensity and other variables and suggest that researchers should examine the individual AIM subscales.

Keywords:

• Affect intensity
• Affect Intensity Measure
• Emotion
• Factor analysis

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This research was supported by National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) Grant R01 MH066079 and National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) Grant P30 DA023026. Its contents are solely the responsibility of the authors and do not necessarily represent the official views of NIMH or NIDA.

Notes

¹We use the label Positive Intensity rather than Serenity because, although the wording of all seven items that load on this factor reflects low Positive Intensity, or Serenity, all items are reverse-scored such that higher scores indicate greater affect intensity.

²We also considered two additional criteria for determining the number of factors to extract: parallel analysis and maximum likelihood (Hoyle & Duvall, 2004). Both suggested a substantially larger number of factors than four—10 by parallel analysis and 11 by maximum likelihood. Although the numbers suggested by these methods satisfied certain statistical criteria, they did so at the sacrifice of parsimony and substantive meaningfulness. Any factors beyond four reflected substantially trivial sources of commonality such as common wording.