In this video I introduce the concept of multidimensional scaling to investigate emotions more objectively. This approach involves considering emotional experiences on two dimensions; valence and level of physiological arousal. Valence refers to how strongly an emotion is experienced as positive or negative, and physiological arousal refers to markers such as heart rate, respiration, and sweat response.
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Video Transcript
Hi, I’m Michael Corayer and this is Psych Exam Review. In this unit we’re going to be looking more closely at emotion and motivation and this means that we’re going to start with a really difficult question and that is: what is an emotion?
Now you might think an emotion is just a feeling that you have, it’s, it’s hard to put into words. It’s almost impossible to describe and even if you manage to describe it you might think that that description is going to be subjective. And if I ask somebody else about the same emotion, I might get a very different description. And so it might be hard to compare those different reports and this might remind you of some of the problems we saw with techniques like introspection; where people reported their conscious experience and the problem was that as we collected reports from many different people, it turns out it’s really hard to compare them because they’re too subjective. The conscious experience of one person doesn’t really correspond to someone else’s experience.
And you might think that this is permanently going to be a problem for investigating something like emotions. These are just subjective feelings and if everybody reports them differently then we can never really agree on what we’re talking about. Now that is a problem for studying emotion, but the good news is that we can compare emotions. So it’s really difficult to define an individual emotion, but it’s a bit easier to compare that emotion to other emotions and think about how they differ.
So an analogy here would be to think about how difficult it is to describe the location of a single city without referring to any other places. So if I ask you, where is New York City? But you can’t tell me any other places, you see it’s really hard, I don’t know how do I describe the location? But if I allow you to compare New York to other cities now you find it much easier to talk about it. Ok, well it’s this far away from Boston and it’s this far from Toronto it’s this far from Los Angeles and it’s this far from Shanghai and by doing that you find now you get a sense of how all these different cities relate to one another. And if you were to give me the distance to New York from a hundred different cities eventually we could sort of narrow it down to a point where say “well this must be where New York is in order for it to satisfy all the correct distances from these others, then it has to be here”.
And so we’re going to take this same approach and apply it to emotions and this approach is called multi-dimensional scaling. So what we’re doing is we’re thinking about two different dimensions for comparing emotions and then by sort of plotting out where the emotions would fall on those dimensions, we sort of have this map of where different emotions are. And so even though we might not have the perfect operational definition of something like happiness, we can say okay well compared to other emotions happiness is somewhere around here.
So the two dimensions that we’re going to look at for emotions are valence and physiological arousal. So what valence refers to is whether or not the emotion is a positive or negative experience and how strongly positive or how strongly negative it is. So you might not be able to carefully define happiness and sadness but you can probably say that well happiness is more of a positive emotion than sadness is, so we’d say it’s more positive valence and the sadness is more negative valence.
And then the second dimension is the physiological arousal. What does it feel like in your body? And here when I say feel like, I mean we’re looking at actual things that we could measure like your heart rate or the conductance of your skin, your sweat response, or your breathing, or your muscle tension. And there we have some objective things that we can look at. Ok, this emotion has a very high level of physiological arousal associated with it and another emotion is may be associated with a lower level of physiological arousal. Ok, so with these two dimensions we can create sort of a graph or a map of emotional emotional responses.
So we can say okay here’s the valence on the x-axis so anything to the left here will be a negative experience and anything to the right would be positive and, you know, the further away we get the more strongly positive or more strongly negative it is. And then the y-axis here is the level of physiological arousal. So sort of in the middle will be sort of neutral and then as we go below this is lower and lower levels of physiological arousal and then as we go higher here, this is more intense physiological arousal. So now we can start thinking about how we would put emotions in on this map.
So we might say okay, let’s pick something like happiness. Ok, well we might, okay first of all, we know it’s gonna be on the right side, right? It’s a positive experience. Now, again, individuals might differ on exactly where they’re going to put it here, but they might say it’s positive if we think about happiness maybe it’s not the most extremely positive but we could say okay it’s positive. And the physiological arousal maybe it’s, you know, somewhere around here. I might say okay there’s some, you know, physiological response to being happy but it’s not the most intense of physiological responses.
So when I said okay this is where we’re gonna say roughly happiness is and then we could say, okay well, where’s something like, you know, I feel bored, you know? We have boredom over here maybe. So okay, it’s a it’s a negative experience, it’s slightly negative, and lower level of physiological arousal. And then we could think about well you know there’s something, a similar level of arousal but positive might be okay feeling relaxed, you know? And so the real difference between being bored and being relaxed is, is it a positive or negative experience, right? The only difference is on that valence; they have similar physiological arousal.
Or we could think about things that sort of match up in another way where they are sort of similar valences, but different physiological arousal. And maybe here you can think about happiness and relaxation that way. Where, you know, feeling happy is maybe more arousing than feeling relaxed even though they’re both positive emotions. And then we could think about you know extremes here. Maybe way up here, extreme physiological arousal and very negative, you know, we might think this is like terror, right? Extreme fear, right? You’re, you’re swimming and there’s a shark fin that comes up near you, right? You’re walking in the woods and you suddenly see a bear running towards you. That’s like, you know, incredibly high level of physiological arousal, about as high as you can get and extremely negative. You really don’t want this to be happening to you, right?
And you know in contrast over here, you know, very high level of physiological arousal and very positive, maybe here is, you know, excitement. You know, this is you’ve just won the lottery and, you know, your heart’s pounding, you’re having trouble breathing, you know? And you’re feeling really good. Alright, and so we can go through and start putting in all sorts of things into this chart and I won’t go through too many more. You might say okay well we have something like a very negative experience, but it’s not super arousing physiologically, might be something like you know maybe we put frustration over here, right?
And so what this allows us to do is to talk about emotions in comparison to one another and to think about things that we might actually be able to measure. Thinking about things like level of heart rate and which emotions are gonna be associated with that and then, you know, whether or not it’s positive or negative as an experience. Alright so this gives us a way to think about emotions that makes it a little clearer than just relying on these subjective reports of how something might feel. Ok, I hope you found this helpful, if so, please like the video and subscribe to the channel for more. Thanks for watching!
