Psychometric Assessment of Emotions and Attitudes !
Emotions:
Emotions can be studied in the laboratory by conducting different experiments. It is important to judge the emotions.
This j can be done through an experiment, in which we try to judge the emotions by using the list of titles of emotions and a group of photos of faces expressing different emotions.
The individual has to select the appropriate emotion from the list and compare that emotion with photos and judge. In other experiments, a part of face is shown to a person and then he is asked to judge the emotions. Even by listening to only voice, not looking at the facial expressions, the emotions of a person can be judged. This can be demonstrated through experiments in laboratories.
Attitudes:
Psychologists have developed many techniques to measure attitudes. The measurement technique depends upon the purpose. As stated above, our evaluations are expressed by terms such as liking- disliking, pro-anti, favouring-not favouring, positive- 1 negative, etc. Most commonly used technique is self-report method.
Self-reporting may be in the form of expressing preferences to an interviewer or to write evaluations of something on a long questionnaire. For example, public opinion (attitudes) polling is a self- reporting method- used to predict outcomes of election, the likelihood of buying a product, or the degree of public support for implementing new policies.
Another important measure is the use of attitude scales.
An attitude scale attempts to obtain a precise measure of the extremity of people’s attitudes. The accuracy of the measurement can be increased by using many items that are all related to the same issue.
There are many attitude scales, very important among them are—Thurston’s Equal Appearing Interval Scale, Likert’s Summated Rating Scale, Bogardus Social Distance Scale, etc.
In addition to the above methods, there are some involuntary behavioural measures which are used to measure the attitude indicators which are not under the voluntary control of the respondent. For example, physiological measures such as Galvanic Skin Response (GSR), Electromyography (EMG), etc.
However, these tests are not commonly used. Change of attitude can be experimentally shown by providing some information about an unknown person. In this experiment, a photo of a person will be shown along with some positive information.
After a gap of time, negative information about the same person will be presented. Then we can find out the effect of this new information on the change of attitude.
Alterations in Emotions:
Some of the alterations in emotions are: Abrupt changes in mood, experiencing conflicting emotions at the same time about the same thing, displaying inappropriate emotional responses such as mania or elation or euphoria (that is excessive joy), depression and extreme sadness or despair.