How does this make you feel? A comparison of four affect induction procedures

Abstract

Affect is a fundamental aspect of the human mind. An increasing number of experiments attempt to examine the influence of affect on other psychological phenomena. To accomplish this research, it is necessary to experimentally modify participants' affective states. In the present experiment, we compared the efficacy of four commonly used affect induction procedures. Participants (38 healthy undergraduate students: 18 males) were randomly assigned to either a pleasant or an unpleasant affect induction group, and then underwent four different affect induction procedures: (1) recall of an affectively salient event accompanied by affectively congruent music, (2) script-driven guided imagery, (3) viewing images while listening to affectively congruent music, and (4) posing affective facial actions, body postures, and vocal expressions. All four affect induction methods were successful in inducing both pleasant and unpleasant affective states. The viewing image with music and recall with music procedures were most effective in enhancing positive affect, whereas the viewing image with music procedure was most effective in enhancing negative affect. Implications for the scientific study of affect are discussed.

What color do you feel? Color choices are driven by mood

“…We used music and mental imagery via short stories to induce joy, relaxation, fear, or sadness in a between‐subject design. As in previous studies, the mood induction technique was successful, and a large proportion of the participants reported feeling the induced mood. Before discussing results in detail below, we highlight that all three color dimensions (hue, lightness, and chroma) contributed to explaining the match between mood and color, which was systematic.…”

“…For example, “sad” music can be experienced as sad as well as pleasurable . When music is contextualized (e.g., with lyrics, mental imagery), the emotional ambiguity is reduced, and it becomes one of the most powerful and widely used techniques for mood induction . In such a mixed technique, participants listen to music and read short stories, which they are asked to actively imagine .…”

“…[33][34][35][36][37] When music is contextualized (e.g., with lyrics, mental imagery), the emotional ambiguity is reduced, and it becomes one of the most powerful and widely used techniques for mood induction. [38][39][40] In such a mixed technique, participants listen to music and read short stories, which they are asked to actively imagine. 41 This procedure has been effective for inducing joy, sadness, fear, anger, [42][43][44] and relaxation.…”

The neural correlates of happiness: A review of PET and fMRI studies using autobiographical recall methods

“…This procedure can be used alone or combined with other mood induction procedures (Jallais & Gilet, 2010). Studies comparing different mood induction procedures have demonstrated the greater effectiveness of autobiographical recall relative to other approaches (Gilet, 2008;Jallais & Gilet, 2010;Zhang, Yu, & Barrett, 2014), especially when it is used to induce positive emotions (Strack, Schwarz, & Gschneidinger, 1985).…”

Cognitive Bias in Ambiguity Judgements: Using Computational Models to Dissect the Effects of Mild Mood Manipulation in Humans

“…There was also a non-significant trend (p<0.1) for Pleasant but not Unpleasant room subjects to show a decrease in the PANAS scale measure of negative affect (NA) across test sessions. Overall, however, effects were very small even though similar affect manipulations have been used successfully in the past (sweet gift: [23, 27]); future studies might employ alternative manipulations such as use of affective images and music, and recall of affectively salient events [28]. In order to minimise the chances of subjects conforming to their expectations of how an emotion manipulation should affect their behaviour, we deliberately attempted to impose an implicit manipulation by not informing them about the presence of the two different rooms.…”