Field: psychology, affective science
Scenario: Suppose you are collecting ratings of valence and arousal (and whatever measure you like), both after stimulus presentation (i.e. STIMULUS PRESENTATION / VALENCE RATING / AROUSAL RATING). Now, suppose that a serious reviewer points out that the best practice is to keep them apart in order to prevent sujects' answers to the former affecting their answers to the latter variable (e.g. STIMULUS a PRESENTATION / VALENCE RATING for a / STIMULUS b PRESENTATION / AROUSAL RATING for b / STIMULUS a PRESENTATION / AROUSAL RATING for a)
Q1: what are the pros and the cons of keeping them separate, as the reviewer urge? Is there any paper discussing this?
Q2: is this affected by stimulus modality?
Q3: if you cannot keep them apart for pragmatic reasons (e.g. you have a high number of stimuli which cannot be presented multiple times), what can you do to mitigate whatever issue results from the adoption of the sub-optimal collection style?
Thanks in advance!
There are two ways to do the two ratings, by default:
1. Present stimuli one at a time, and ask to rate valence first, then strength (stick with the same order, or you will confuse your participant)
2. Present stimuli for the first round, and ask for valence ratings, and then present them for the second round, and ask for strength ratings.
Either way, you can counterbalance the sequence of two-round ratings, e.g., half Ss rate valence first, half rate strength first. But do not change the order within a participant. I find people are not good at following such instructions.
Q1: While there are many papers showing that order effects can arise in self-report measures, I do not know of any specifically showing that valence and arousal judgements show order effects.
Q2: The U-shaped (quadratic) arousal vs. valence curve has been observed using a variety of stimuli and modalities. There are many published papers in support of this.
Q3: I concur with Liangzi Shi that you can counterbalance valence and arousal ratings between participants to help control for order effects, but it's not a good idea to counterbalance the order within participants.
Dear,
U will display stimuli on the participants then u can use pen and paper to identify the valence and arousal, u cannot separate them because they are working together. But there are another method to measure valence and arousal which is maybe more accurate because there are some muscles on the participants face not clear (i.e., zygomatic muscles). These tools are psychological tools such as EMG and GSR.
Hi Marco,
Apart from the good solutions already provided here, I would suggest a slightly different (and perhaps riskier) paradigm, especially in the case where, for whatever reason, you cannot use two different presentation rounds, but you're supposed to let your participants attend to each stimulus just once.
You can create two balanced between-subjects conditions: in condition A, the order would be Stimulus > Valence > Arousal; in condition B, the order would of course be Stimulus > Arousal > Valence.
From the analytic standpoint, the presentation order, coded dichotomously (0-1) can be used in several ways:
I hope this can be of help for your research ;)
- Badges
- Science topic
- Similar topics
- Engineering
- Materials Engineering
- Powders