Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Figures
- Foreword
- Prologue
- 1 Documenting the breadth and depth of the problem
- 2 Untangling the terminological Gordian knot
- 3 Should affective states be considered as distinct entities or as positioned along dimensions?
- 4 Are pleasant and unpleasant states independent or polar opposites?
- 5 Selecting a measure
- 6 The old classics
- 7 Dimensional measures
- 8 Domain-specific measurement
- 9 Problems of domain specificity
- Epilogue
- References
- Index
Prologue
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 March 2013
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Figures
- Foreword
- Prologue
- 1 Documenting the breadth and depth of the problem
- 2 Untangling the terminological Gordian knot
- 3 Should affective states be considered as distinct entities or as positioned along dimensions?
- 4 Are pleasant and unpleasant states independent or polar opposites?
- 5 Selecting a measure
- 6 The old classics
- 7 Dimensional measures
- 8 Domain-specific measurement
- 9 Problems of domain specificity
- Epilogue
- References
- Index
Summary
Simple can be harder than complex. You have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple.
– Steve Jobs, in an interview to Business Week, May 25, 1998My goal was to write the guidebook I wish I had available to me when I was starting out as a junior researcher 25 years ago. While still an undergraduate student, I became interested in learning more about the affective changes that occur when people participate in physical activity. At that time, I had some elementary background in psychology but had not taken even a single course on emotional or affective phenomena for the simple reason that such courses did not exist back then, at least at the universities I attended. My knowledge about emotion was limited to the highly abridged summaries of the classic theories of William James and Walter Cannon contained in introductory textbooks.
Lacking background and guidance, I made every mistake imaginable. I used measures without knowing much about them and certainly without having a good grasp of their theoretical underpinnings or their relative strengths and limitations. I selected one measure over another on the basis of such profoundly naive criteria as their brevity or popularity. I measured one variable (e.g., emotion) but discussed my results as if I had measured another (e.g., mood). I measured only a small part of a domain of content (e.g., only a few discrete mood states) but my ignorance led me to generalize to the entire domain (e.g., the global domain of mood). I based my conclusions on measures that were deeply l awed although even a rudimentary psychometric analysis would have alerted me to this fact.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Measurement of Affect, Mood, and EmotionA Guide for Health-Behavioral Research, pp. xiv - xxiiPublisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2013