The inadequacy of normative ratings for building stimulus sets in affective science.

Abstract

When investigating the brain, bodily, or behavioral correlates of emotional experience, researchers often present participants with stimuli that are assumed to reliably and exclusively evoke an instance of one, and only one, emotion category across participants (e.g., a fear stimulus, a joy stimulus, and so on). These assumptions are driven by a typological view. Here, we tested the extent to which they are met. Across three studies (total N = 453), participants reported their experiences as they viewed silent video clips or static images that were curated from published studies and from online search engines. Two different response formats were used. Overall, the proportion of stimulus-evoked emotion experiences that met even lenient benchmarks for validity and reliability for labeling a stimulus as pertaining to a single emotion category label was exceedingly low. Furthermore, participants frequently used more than one label for a given instance. The findings suggest that typological assumptions, and the nomothetic approach they align with, rely on assumptions that are rarely, if ever, met in stimulus-evoked paradigms. Correspondingly, the use of group-averaged normative ratings masks tremendous variation that is potentially meaningful. An overreliance on these norms may lead to conclusions that emotions are organized as discrete categories, yet these theory-laden conclusions may have limited generalizability regarding the emotional experiences of individual people during these tasks. Rather, emotional experiences evoked by visual stimuli are multifaceted (i.e., involve multiple labels per instance) and vary tremendously across individuals. Future work may benefit from multifaceted measurement of emotion and idiographic, data-driven modeling approaches. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).