Affect Intensity and Subjective Ratings of Emotional Pictures and Sounds

Affect intensity refers to the intensity with which people experience their emotional response. Individual differences in affect intensity are supposed to be related to the strength of the response to emotional stimuli. Previous studies showed that participants with high affect intensity responded to emotional stimuli with stronger or more intense affective reactions than participants scoring low in affect intensity However, previous studies are mainly limited to the impact of affect intensity on consumer responses to advertising appeals or are limited to the use of life events descriptions as emotional stimuli. No previous studies used behavioural measures of the emotional response to standardized stimuli, varying in terms of arousal. In the present study the predictive value of affect intensity, measured by a self-report questionnaire, the Affect Intensity Measure (AIM), on the emotional response to standardized pictures and sounds has been investigated. In particular, the predictive value of affective intensity measured by the AIM, using both the total AIM total score and the four subscales scores, on subjective arousal ratings of different categories of standardized emotional pictures and sounds was assessed on a nonclinical sample. The total AIM score has been found to be predictive for subjective arousal scores for low unpleasant pictures while, using the AIM subscales scores, results showed that the Negative Reactivity subscale was predictive for arousal scores to high negative pictures and sounds. These findings seem to show that the use of the total AIM score can obscure the relationships between specific features of affect intensity and other variables. Moreover, the present results didn’t show a general effect of affect intensity on behavioural responses to emotional standardized stimuli but an emotion specific effect for high negative stimuli.