Vaccaro Anthony G
Department of Psychology, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA USA.
Affect Sci. 2024 Sep 5;5(3):190-195. doi: 10.1007/s42761-024-00263-z. eCollection 2024 Sep.
Affective science has taken up the challenge of building a bridge between basic affective science and practical applications. The articles in the Future of Affective Science issue lay out methodological and conceptual frameworks that allow us to expand affective science into real-world settings and to handle naturalistic methods. Along with these advances, accomplishing this goal will require additionally refocusing the types of experiences we study, and the measures of experience we are interested in. This paper explores the necessity for basic affective science to embrace the messy and complex nature of human emotion in order to bridge the gap between theoretical concepts and real-world applicability. Specifically, this involves studying experiences that do not fit as neatly into dominant conceptual frameworks, such as valenced scales and the most common discrete emotion categories, and that may be more difficult to measure or experimentally control. This makes the gap between affective science and real-world feelings larger. To move the field towards incorporating emotional complexity in an empirical manner, I propose measurement standards that err on the side of less fixed-choice options and using stimuli chosen for their potential to elicit highly complex responses over time within the same individual. Designing studies that can measure these experiences will push emotion theories to explain data they were not originally designed for, likely leading to refinement and collaboration. These approaches will help capture the full spectrum of human emotional experience, leading to a more nuanced and applicable understanding of affective science.
情感科学已接受了在基础情感科学与实际应用之间架起桥梁的挑战。《情感科学的未来》这一特刊中的文章阐述了方法和概念框架，使我们能够将情感科学扩展到现实世界的场景中，并运用自然主义方法。随着这些进展，要实现这一目标还需要重新聚焦我们所研究的体验类型以及我们感兴趣的体验测量方式。本文探讨了基础情感科学接纳人类情感的混乱和复杂本质的必要性，以便弥合理论概念与现实世界适用性之间的差距。具体而言，这涉及研究那些不太能整齐地纳入主导概念框架（如效价量表和最常见的离散情绪类别）的体验，这些体验可能更难测量或进行实验控制。这使得情感科学与现实世界感受之间的差距更大。为了推动该领域以实证方式纳入情感复杂性，我提出了一些测量标准，这些标准倾向于减少固定选择选项，并使用因其有可能在同一个体内随着时间引发高度复杂反应而被选中的刺激。设计能够测量这些体验的研究将促使情感理论去解释它们原本并非为其设计的数据，这可能会带来理论的完善与合作。这些方法将有助于捕捉人类情感体验的全貌，从而对情感科学有更细致入微且适用的理解。
