Content uploaded by G. A. Mendelsohn
Author content
All content in this area was uploaded by G. A. Mendelsohn on Aug 03, 2015
Content may be subject to copyright.
Journal
of
Personality
and
Social Psychology
1989,
Vol.
57, No.
3,493-502
Copyright
1989
by
the
American
PswWoeical
Association,
Inc.
0022-3514/89/J00.75
Affect
Grid:
A
Single-Item
Scale
of
Pleasure
and
Arousal
James
A.
Russell
University
of
British
Columbia,
Vancouver
British Columbia, Canada
Anna
Weiss
and
Gerald
A.
Mendelsohn
University
of
California,
Berkeley
This article introduces
a
single-item scale,
the
Affect
Grid,
designed
as a
quick means
of
assessing
affect
along
the
dimensions
of
pleasure-displeasure
and
arousal-sleepiness.
The
Affect
Grid
is
poten-
tially
suitable
for any
study that requires judgments about
affect
of
either
a
descriptive
or a
subjective
kind.
The
scale
was
shown
to
have
adequate
reliability,
convergent validity,
and
discriminant validity
in 4
studies
in
which college students used
the
Affect
Grid
to
describe
(a)
their current mood,
(b)
the
meaning
of
emotion-related words,
and (c) the
feelings
conveyed
by
facial
expressions. Other
studies
are
cited
to
illustrate
the
potential uses
of
the
Affect
Grid
as a
measure
of
mood.
In
this article,
we
introduce
the
Affect
Grid,
a
scale designed
as a
quick
means
of
assessing
affect
along
the
dimensions
of
pleasure-displeasure
and
arousal-sleepiness.
The
Affect
Grid
is
potentially suitable
for any
study that requires judgments
about
affect
of
either
a
descriptive
or a
subjective kind.
The
Affect
Grid
is a
single-item
scale.
Our aim was for an
instrument
that would
be
short
and
easy
to fill out and
that
could,
therefore,
be
used rapidly
and
repeatedly. Currently
available
scales
of
affect
are
multiple-item checklists
or
ques-
tionnaires that
are too time-consuming or too
distracting
for
some
purposes.
In
particular, they
do not
lend themselves
to
continuous
or
quickly repeated observation. They
are
awkward
in
dealing
with
the
rapid fluctuations
of
affect