Department of Human Development and Human Neuroscience Institute, Cornell University.
Psychol Sci. 2018 Oct;29(10):1706-1715. doi: 10.1177/0956797618780353. Epub 2018 Aug 21.
Valence and arousal are core dimensions of emotion, but the relation between them has eluded scientific consensus. The emotional-ambiguity hypothesis is the first new model of this relation to appear in some years. It introduces the novel principle that the relation between valence and arousal is controlled by a variable that is not traditionally measured: the uncertainty of perceived valence. A comprehensive evaluation of this principle was conducted using publicly available emotional word and emotional picture databases. There was compelling support for the hypothesis in both types of databases and for both positive and negative valence: The strength of the relation between perceived arousal and perceived positivity or negativity decreased linearly as valence perceptions became more ambiguous. These results explain some puzzling facts about the valence-arousal relation that figure prominently in literature reviews, and they provide a solution to the problem of how to remove arousal confounds from valence effects.
效价和唤醒度是情绪的核心维度，但它们之间的关系一直未能达成科学共识。情感模糊性假说（Emotional-ambiguity hypothesis）是近年来首次出现的这一关系的新模型。它引入了一个新的原则，即效价和唤醒度之间的关系受一个传统上未被测量的变量控制：感知效价的不确定性。使用公开的情感词和情感图片数据库对这一原则进行了全面评估。该假说在情感词和情感图片两种数据库中均得到了强有力的支持，且适用于正性和负性效价：感知唤醒度与感知正性或负性之间的关系强度呈线性下降，而效价感知变得越模糊。这些结果解释了文献综述中一些关于效价唤醒关系的令人费解的事实，并为如何从效价效应中消除唤醒混淆提供了一种解决方案。
