Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Affect scales typically involve recognition of emotions from a predetermined list. However, the emotions that we expe-rience most often may be largely due to recall based processes influenced by what emotions come to mind. Our newlyintroduced emotional affect scale based on recall of emotions, called the Emotional Fluency Task, captures dimensions ofemotions that are not available in PANAS but that are nonetheless commonly reported as experienced emotions. Here, weshow that the emotional fluency task is valid and can be reliably measured using paper and pencil. By asking people to ratetheir valence and arousal, EFT paper and pencil clearly captured both positive and negative emotions and do so as well orbetter than semantic similarity measures. This provides a highly useful scale that can be used across different languages.