Identification of stimuli that trigger specific emotions

The aim of the present research is to develop a standardized database of emotional stimuli based on imaginary instructions. A list was prepared containing a total of 154 descriptions of affective events as the imaginal instruction method in the induction of emotional states. The structure of emotional states were identified on the basis of psycholexical and diary studies (Gorbaniuk et al, in preparation). The list of emotional states includes: joy, sadness, fear, shame, anger, surprise, pride, regret and disgust. Respondents will assess descriptions of affective events by a computer assisted survey (off-line computer survey). The stimuli in the form of descriptions of situations will be presented in random order. Respondents will evaluate the list in 3 stages with an interval of 1 week between stages to increase the reliability of the evaluations, and 1/3 of the events will be evaluated per stage. The expected minimum sample of respondents is at least 100 people. The proposed statistical analyses are cluster analysis (identifying events with similar configurations of generated emotional states), ANOVA (testing differences between the seeds of different emotional states for each event) with a two-level approach (separating variance due to individual differences from variance due to differences between events). The respondents will rate each description of the event on a scale from 0 to 8 in terms of the intensity of each emotion considered, arousal also on a scale from 0 to 8, in addition, they will also rate valuation on a negative-positive continuum on a scale from 1 to 9. Similar methods have also been used to develop well-known stimulus databases: the International Affective Picture System (IAPS), the Nencki Affective Picture System (NAPS), and the Geneva Affective Picture Database (GAPED).