Development and Validation of Verbal Emotion Vignettes in Portuguese, English, and German

Abstract

Everyday human social interaction involves sharing experiences verbally and these experiences often include emotional content. Providing this context generally leads to the experience of emotions in the conversation partner. However, most emotion elicitation stimulus sets are based on images or film-sequences providing visual and/or auditory emotion cues. To assimilate what occurs within social interactions, the current study aimed at creating and validating verbal emotion vignettes as stimulus set to elicit emotions (anger, disgust, fear, sadness, happiness, gratitude, guilt, and neutral). Participants had to mentally immerse themselves in 40 vignettes and state which emotion they experienced next to the intensity of this emotion. The vignettes were validated on a large sample of native Portuguese-speakers ( N = 229), but also on native English-speaking ( N = 59), and native German-speaking ( N = 50) samples to maximise applicability of the vignettes. Hierarchical cluster analyses showed that the vignettes mapped clearly on their target emotion categories in all three languages. The final stimulus sets each include 4 vignettes per emotion category plus 1 additional vignette per emotion category which can be used for task familiarisation procedures within research. The high agreement rates on the experienced emotion in combination with the medium to large intensity ratings in all three languages suggest that the stimulus sets are suitable for application in emotion research (e.g., emotion recognition or emotion elicitation).

A divergent effect of stimulus perceptual details on affective and semantic representations of valence.

“…That is, affect is elicited only by activation of perceptual representation. According to such mechanism, a purely symbolic stimulus, such as a word (Larsen et al, 2003) or vignettes (Wingenbach et al, 2019) would not be able to elicit affect by itself. Affect that is elicited by words or vignettes needs an additional step such as mental imagery.…”

Revisiting the ego-syntonic assumption: Investigating neuroticism and harmony with thoughts of negative emotions.

“…For descriptive information on the dependent measures discussed in this section, see Table 1. For Task 2, participants read six randomly presented vignettes in which two were shown to predominantly induce either fear, sadness, or anger (some adapted from Friedman-Wheeler et al, 2016; Wingenbach et al, 2019). 1 Participants responded to items assessing their reactions to each vignette using a 1 ( not at all ) to 9 ( very much ) scale with “5” as a midpoint signaling neither the presence nor absence of the perception/reaction.…”

Development and validation of the Japanese version of verbal emotion vignettes in a student sample

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Scenario-based emotional stimuli can deal with environmental restrictions, psychological shocks, and difficulties in evoking complex emotions. This study aimed to translate the emotion vignettes by Wingenbach et al (2019) into Japanese and validate them. In the translation process based on the ISPOR guidelines, two forward translators translated the vignettes into Japanese, and then one back-translator translated them into English.

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