• Question: Is there a way to truly measure emotions?

    Asked by anon-237450 to Peter, Mhairi, Madeleine, Catherine, Andrew on 16 Mar 2020.
    • Photo: Madeleine Pownall

      Madeleine Pownall answered on 16 Mar 2020:

      Excellent question!

      In my research, I sometimes have to make do with ‘self-report’ scales, which ask people to report how they are thinking and feeling (for example, on a scale from 1 (very unhappy) to 7 (very happy). This isn’t a perfect measure, because we don’t always know how we’re truly feeling and we may not have the words for it, but it’s the best way of getting lots of data from lots of people without having to sit and interview everyone individually.

      Another approach to studying emotion is to do exactly that! Qualitative researchers use text rather than numbers as their data. Qualitative methods include interviews with people, focus groups with lots of people, or written exercises (like diaries or journals). The researcher then looks through the text data and tries to figure out how the participants (people who did the study) are feeling. They can be very useful at measuring ’emotion’ in depth, although it will always be a slippery and complex thing to measure!

    • Photo: Catherine Talbot

      Catherine Talbot answered on 17 Mar 2020:

      Great question, I am a qualitative researcher so i measure emotions by asking people how they feel. I sometimes ask people to write these feelings down, or I interview them (like a journalist), or we have group conversations (called focus groups). I then look through the data to identify patterns in how people think and feel. This is what i love about my job, as i get to turn people’s experiences into scientific data!! There are also other ways of measuring people’s emotions such as using scales. Some scientists also focus on how emotions are expressed in the brain – so they might use brain scans to see what areas of the brain light up when you feel a certain way.

    • Photo: Mhairi Bowe

      Mhairi Bowe answered on 18 Mar 2020:

      We can measure self-reported emotion quantitatively using questionnaire scales – and many psychologists use this method in their research – but others (qualitative psychologists) believe you need to ask people about their emotions, e.g., in interviews, and examine the experience and interpretation of that experience from the individual’s own perspective or you can observe emotional expression in natural environments. Other experimental researchers look at manipulating experiences in the lab (e.g., giving false negative feedback on performance) and measuring behavioural responses (e.g., administering hot chilli sauce to other participants) and taking that as an indicator of emotions such as anger.

    • Photo: Andrew McNeill

      Andrew McNeill answered on 20 Mar 2020:

      It depends on what you mean by emotions. Emotions are very complex things that include physical sensations and mental thoughts that are filtered through our culture’s way of describing emotions. The short answer then is, no, you can’t truly measure whether someone is happy or sad. The best thing you can do is ask them!

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