Abstract
This project investigates four central issues concerning the nature of neutral affect. Specifically, whether neutral affect is (a) a common experience, (b) dependent on positive and negative affect, (c) occurs at all levels of activation, and (d) is discriminable from other, seemingly similar, affective states. In three studies, participants rated their neutral affect (e.g., feeling indifferent) and affective states that occupy major regions of the affective circumplex. First, neutral affect was a commonly reported experience. Second, neutral affect was independent of and co-occurred with both positive and negative affect, as well as all the other affective states. Third, the activation measures were problematic. The tentative data indicated that neutral affect occurred across the activation dimension, but it was more reflective of a deactivated than activated state. Finally, neutral affect was discriminable from both negative and positive deactivated states. The paper concludes by providing some methodological and theoretical recommendations regarding the conceptualization of neutral affect.
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Notes
Reisenzein (1994) also had participants rate how neutral they felt, which was defined as “a state characterized by the absence of emotion” (p. 533). These ratings fell close to the center of the circumplex; however, because neutral affect was defined as the absence of emotion, it is unclear to what extent this finding reflects people’s natural placement of neutral affect or placement in accordance with the author’s definition.
When we examined a 4-factor solution, the results were the same as the 3-factor solution, except that two neutral items (so-so = .50 and okay = .36) now comprised the 4th factor, with rather low loadings. Given these low loadings, it seemed that a 3-factor solution better captured the data. We also examined a 2-factor solution. Here neutral items loaded negatively on the positive affect factor, but all the loadings on this factor were rather modest (0.55 to 0.70). Taken together, we deemed that the 3-factor solution made the most sense.
We did not conduct MIN analyses for Study 1, because this study did not use a two-step procedure to measure affect. As a result, Study 1 could be over-estimating co-occurrence amongst affective states and potentially leading to misleading results.
Keep in mind, when states of ambivalence are induced, positive and negative affect can and do co-occur. These data merely indicate that on a day-to-day basis, ambivalence is not a state that people report with great frequency.
We included “sleepy” on the deactivation factor because Barrett and Russell (1998) did so. In hindsight, it makes sense that sleepy would be associated more strongly with feeling tired than with deactivation.
We also re-ran the model with alert on the positive activation measure. This model did not have better fit than our original model, χ2 (263) = 697.10, CMIN/DF = 2.65, CFI = .90, RMSEA = .06 95%CI [.055, .066], SRMR = .07. Because of this lack of better fit, we decided not to include alert on the positive activation factor.
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This research was supported by a grant from the National Science Foundation (0952848) awarded to Dr. Karen Gasper.
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The first and second author contributed to the conception and design. They also designed the studies and materials. All others contributed to data analyses. The first author wrote the first draft, all authors contributed to and commented on subsequent drafts. All authors approve the final manuscript.
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Approval was obtained from the Office of Research Protections at The Pennsylvania State University. The procedures used in this study adhere to the tenets of the Declaration of Helsinki.
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Gasper, K., Danube, C.L. & Hu, D. Making room for neutral affect: Evidence indicating that neutral affect is independent of and co-occurs with eight affective states. Motiv Emot 45, 103–121 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11031-020-09861-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11031-020-09861-3