UC Riverside

Many measures of affect exist, but they are used inconsistently in psychological studies (Weidman, Steckler, & Tracy, 2016). The present aimed to create a short affect measure that reconciles different views of emotion. The aim was a measure that represents all four quadrants of the affective circumplex, reduces redundancy, and retains good measurement properties. A list of items was created from previous measures and studies of affect, then refined manually. In Study 1a, participants described emotional episodes, then recalled the extent to which they felt each of the 354 feelings. In Study 1b, research assistants answered questions about each of the feeling items, rating them on a series of dimensions including pleasantness and arousal. These ratings were used to sort words into the four quadrants of the affective circumplex. An exploratory factor analysis on the data from Study 1a revealed two factors. The 20 highest-loading items from each quadrant were included in Study 2. After eliminating redundant items and adding theoretically important items, 76 items were included in Study 2. Study 2 was used to further narrow down items using an EFA, as well as other indices such as study frequency, Google Ngram frequency, and reliability. Using these metrics, three items from each quadrant were chosen for the final 12 item scale, called the brief affect measure (BAM). The scale revealed high convergent validity with other affect scales, good discriminant validity, and high internal consistency reliability. Future studies are needed to further validate this measure in a new sample.