Affective Saturation Index: A Lexical Measure of Affect

Abstract

Affect plays a major role in the individual’s daily life, driving the sensemaking of experience, psychopathological conditions, social representations of phenomena, and ways of coping with others. The characteristics of affect have been traditionally investigated through physiological, self-report, and behavioral measures. The present article proposes a text-based measure to detect affect intensity: the Affective Saturation Index (ASI). The ASI rationale and the conceptualization of affect are overviewed, and an initial validation study on the ASI’s convergent and concurrent validity is presented. Forty individuals completed a non-clinical semi-structured interview. For each interview transcript, the ASI was esteemed and compared to the individual’s physiological index of propensity to affective arousal (measured by heart rate variability (HRV)); transcript semantic complexity (measured through the Semantic Entropy Index (SEI)); and lexical syntactic complexity (measured through the Flesch–Vacca Index (FVI)). ANOVAs and bi-variate correlations estimated the size of the relationships between indexes and sample characteristics (age, gender), then a set of multiple linear regressions tested the ASI’s association with HRV, the SEI, and the FVI. Results support the ASI construct and criteria validity. The ASI proved able to detect affective saturation in interview transcripts (SEI and FVI, adjusted R2 = 0.428 and adjusted R2 = 0.241, respectively) and the way the text’s affective saturation reflected the intensity of the individual’s affective state (HRV, adjusted R2 = 0.428). In conclusion, although the specificity of the sample (psychology students) limits the findings’ generalizability, the ASI provides the chance to use written texts to measure affect in accordance with a dynamic approach, independent of the spatio-temporal setting in which they were produced. In doing so, the ASI provides a way to empower the empirical analysis of fields such as psychotherapy and social group dynamics.

Nachträglichkeit and après-coup in the psychological scientific literature: A systematic review and future perspectives.

“…In the second instance, in which N/AC also appears as a meaning-making process, a qualitative research perspective on an adequate sample of audio-recorded therapies can be applied. Although the measurement of meaning-making constructs lags behind theoretical conceptualizations, thus hindering empirical progress, some current approaches can assess meaning-making-related phenomena, including global and situational meaning constructs, such as discourse flow analyses (Salvatore et al, 2010) or the Affectivity Saturation Index (Gennaro et al, 2021).…”

Studying Physiological Synchrony in Couple Therapy through Partial Directed Coherence: Associations with the Therapeutic Alliance and Meaning Construction

“…The Autonomic Nervous System (ANS) plays a key role in cognition, emotion and behavior [24], and although ANS activation is not specific to affect, most emotions are associated with increased physiological arousal [25,26]. As such, several recent studies include psychophysiological measures in psychotherapy process research and treat physiological activation, and particularly its arousal component, as an index of affect [27,28]. In this literature, it is assumed that measures of psychophysiology enable the study of aspects of the therapy process that may not be accessible through self-report or observation, and can therefore add another layer of information on clinical process [29].…”

Complexity Science in Human Change: Research, Models, Clinical Applications

“…In their contribution, Gennaro et al [ 13 ] introduce a novel lexical method called the affective saturation index (ASI) to assess affectivity based on interview transcripts. Affect is semiotically defined as a sign that makes sense of the world in terms of patterns of bodily activation.…”