The Measurement and Phenomenology of Emotions

In order to study human emotions in a laboratory setting, researchers often use standardized image libraries designed to elicit specific emotions in people. Aleš Oblak from the Ljubljana Psychiatric Clinic presented a study on what people actually experience when asked to report the emotion elicited by a particular image. He is interested in whether people genuinely feel an emotion in response to the image, or whether they report feeling an emotion simply because the experiment expects them to.

He included over 500 participants in the study, both with various psychiatric diagnoses and without any diagnosis. Before performing the tasks, he assessed their phenomenological control using a standardized scale—this refers to an individual’s ability to generate experiences in their consciousness in order to meet expectations. People with high phenomenological control are more susceptible to suggestion and, for example, easier to hypnotize. After completing the tasks, he conducted phenomenological interviews with the participants, in which they described how they experienced the task.

Among the participants without a diagnosis who did not feel the expected emotion in response to the images, he identified three types. The first group felt nothing but reported the expected emotion, knowing what was anticipated from them, and then honestly discussed this in the interview. The second group, aware of the expectation to feel a particular emotion, actively “convinced themselves” that they had experienced it. They reported this additional step in the interviews. The third group only became convinced they had experienced an emotion at the moment they were required to report it.

Among participants with a diagnosis, the emotional responses to the images were less consistent and more unpredictable. In some participants, EEG was used during the tasks. It showed that people with high phenomenological control—those whose self-reports were more aligned with what was expected—constructed the experienced emotion so quickly that they had no conscious access to the process. Aleš hypothesizes that they do indeed experience an emotion, but it is not a response to the image itself, rather a response to the expectations created by the experiment.