Reliability of accuracy and intensity judgments of eliciting situations of emotions.

Abstract
This paper deals with the ability of human subjects to accurately and reliably label the emotional nature of verbal descriptions of situations. It also looks at the homogeneity of the emotional content of these situations as they are assessed by raters. Six emotional categories were studied: happiness, surprise, fear, disgust, anger, and sadness. The various items of our questionnaire were selected by asking a sample of naive sujects to write stories for each of the six aforementioned emotions. In the first study, it was found that the items that were written by our subjects were accurately and reliably recognized by other sujects coming from the same culture background. In a second study, some further information were gathered by asking other subjects to evaluate the intensity of each of the six emotions that could be present in the various situations. Also, the reliability of these intensity judgments was assessed. The results showed that, overall, the items of our questionnaire were quite specific, that is, they were clearly associated with one specific emotion. Also, the specific emotion was judged as having a fairly high intensity. Finally, it was shown that usually intensity judgments were stable over time.

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