Semantic and affective manifestations of ambi (valence)

ABSTRACT

People sometimes report both pleasant and unpleasant feelings when presented with affective stimuli. However, what is reported as “mixed emotions” might reflect semantic knowledge about the stimulus (Russell, J. A. (2017). Mixed emotions viewed from the psychological constructionist perspective. Emotion Review, 9(2), 111–117). The following research examines to what degree self-reported mixed emotions represent actual feelings compared to knowledge about the stimulus. In a series of three experiments, participants reported either their feelings or their knowledge in response to affective stimuli. In Experiment 1, we sampled the entire IAPS pictorial space and examined the proportion of mixed emotion ratings using feelings-focused and knowledge-focused self-reports. We found a higher degree of mixed emotions under knowledge-focused than feelings-focused self-reports. In Experiment 2, we used a priori selected pictures to elicit mixed emotions. The proportion of mixed emotions was again higher under knowledge-focused instructions. In Experiment 3, we used movie clips that were previously used to elicit mixed emotions. In contrast to Experiments 1 and 2, there was no difference between feelings-focused and knowledge-focused self-reports. The results suggest a strong semantic component and a weak experiential component of self-reports in the case of pictorial stimuli. However, ambivalent movie clips elicited a stronger experiential component, thus supporting the existence of mixed emotions at the level of feelings.

KEYWORDS:

• Mixed emotions
• ambivalence
• valence

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 Picture number in the IAPS:

Table

2 In Experiments 1, 2 and 3 facial electromyography signal was collected and will not be reported here.

3 Only pure positive reports obtained in the positive condition were included in the pure positive index (pure positive reports to pictures from the negative or ambivalent conditions were not included in the pure positive index). Similar logic was applied to the pure negative index (only pure negative reports to pictures from the negative condition were included) and to the mixed emotion index (only mixed emotion reports to pictures from the ambivalent condition were included).

4 The pictures used in Larsen et al., (2003) were sampled from the same pool as those selected for Experiment 1 in the current work.