Comparing your "happy" to my "happy": how to assess the individual affective space.

Emotions are of utmost relevance for everyday life and the development and maintenance of psychological disorders. Emotion theories mainly describe emotions as generalisable experiences, whereas differences in individual affective dynamics are less researched. Therefore, we endeavoured developing a tool to assess individual mental representations of emotions, aiming for a rich, yet replicable informational structure. We compared three methods: (1) A Multi-Arrangement Task (MAT), (2) Pairwise Comparisons (PC), and (3) Self-Assessment Manikin (SAM) rating scales. Using a within-subjects design (N = 103), emotional adjectives were arranged or rated on a computer monitor with subsequent calculation of a dissimilarity matrix of each item's emotional impact. These matrices showed good test-retest reliabilities for each method, while clear differences emerged in the exploratory analyses. Dimensionality analyses using multidimensional scaling showed two, respectively three, dimensions yielding an ideal solution to represent the data in the SAM, with some participants using up to five dimensions in the MAT. Quantifying the affective spaces as polygons revealed the highest correlation of surface areas in the MAT, indicating that MAT might be particularly useful when focusing on emotion differentiation. By developing an instrument measuring the individual affective space, we propose applying the personalised medicine approach to emotions and, eventually, transferring the results to psychiatry and psychotherapy for better treatments.