Conditions and Scenarios Eliciting Emotions of Disgust, Anger, Shame, Sadness and Happiness

Abstract

The main goal of the present study was to have an idea about antecedent events of disgust, anger, shame, sadness and happiness in our society. Besides, to elicit these emotions, it was aimed to develop scenarios and test the effectiveness of them. The study was conducted in two stages. In the first stage, participants described events that had caused them to feel disgust, anger, shame, sadness and happiness. Based on these descriptions, by considering their contents, the judges grouped antecedent events which induced targeted emotions and they named the each delineative category. To test the comprehensibility of the categories and their names, different judge groups evaluated the categories and assigned antecedents to each emotion belonging to randomly selected participants of these categories. In this way, in our culture the antecedents of disgust, anger, shame, sadness and happiness were determined. Taking account of the most frequently mentioned antecedents of emotions, scenarios were composed. In the second stage of the study, the effectiveness of the scenarios were tested. The participants were asked to read the scenarios imagining as if they were protagonist and to rate their emotional responses according to several emotional criterias (valence, discreteness, arousal, positive and negative affect). Results indicated that all of the scenarios elicited the target emotions and theoretically reasonable emotions in terms of valence and arousal. Furthermore, all scenarios differed in terms of positive and negative affect related with positive and negative emotions. The results demonstrated that these scenarios can be used to elicit the targeted emotions in the researches which would be conducted in the future.