Individual Differences in the Experience of Emotion: Moderators of Mood and Cognition
Increasing interest in individual differences related to emotion is evident in the appearance of a growing number of self-report instruments that assess aspects of the feeling experience. This article reviews some of the currently available measures that assess these and other individual differences in subjective feeling experiences. Included in the review is information such as the number of items, response format, reliability, gender differences, construct validity, and correlates. Three studies are also reported. The first involved an analysis of responses to 10 of the scales, which disclosed 5 factors--Absorption, Attention, Clarity, Intensity, and Expression. The second study analyzed an expanded set of 18 scales using cluster analyses, finding evidence for the same 5 categories as well as evidence for 4 clusters of individuals defined in terms of their differences in patterns of response to the 5 scale types. A third study also found evidence for 4 clusters of individuals defined in terms of differences in the pattern of their responses to 3 of the 5 scale types. These were labeled Hot, Overwhelmed, Cerebral, and Cool. This study included an experiment to examine how these emotional types reacted differently to mood manipulations, which in turn led to different judgments and processing decisions.
University of Illinois - Urbana-Champaign
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University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign