Dr. Jeanne Tsai is a Professor of Psychology at Stanford University and Director of the Stanford Culture and Emotion Lab. Her research examines how culture shapes affective processes (emotions, moods, feelings) and the implications that cultural and individual differences in these processes have for what decisions people make, how they think about health and illness, how they express themselves, and how they perceive and respond to others in an increasingly multicultural world.
Dr. Jeanne Tsai formulated Affect Valuation Theory (AVT) in the early 2000s. AVT addresses the question of how cultural ideas and practices shape emotion. AVT has three main premises: 1) how people actually feel (“actual affect”) differs from how they ideally want to feel (“ideal affect”); 2) cultural factors shape ideal affect more than actual affect; and 3) people try to reduce the discrepancy between their actual and ideal affect by engaging in specific mood-producing behaviors that help them achieve their ideal affect.
Affect Valuation Index (AVI)
Affect Valuation Index (AVI) was developed in 2001 by Dr. Jeanne Tsai and Dr. Brian Knutson to distinguish between ideal affect and actual affect. The measure of actual affect asks respondents to use a 5-point rating scale (1 =not at all and 5 = an extreme amount) to indicate how much they actually feel a number of states on average (other time frames can be used, such as “over the course of a typical week” “right now”). The measure of ideal affect asks respondents to use the same rating scale to indicate how much they ideally want to feel the same states on average (other time frames can be used, such as “over the course of a typical week” “right now”).
General Ethnicity Questionnaire (GEQ)
The General Ethnicity Questionnaire (GEQ) is a measure of cultural orientation that can be used with individuals of different cultural backgrounds by changing the reference culture. The GEQ was adapted from four different pre-existing and commonly used measures of acculturation, the Cultural Life Styles Inventory (Mendoza, 1989), the Acculturation Rating Scale for Mexican Americans (Cuellar, Harris, & Jasso, 1980), the Suinn-Lew Asian Self-Identity Acculturation Rating Scale (Suinn, Rickard-Figueroa, Lew, & Vigil, 1987), and the Behavioral Acculturation Scale (Szapocznik, Scopetta, Kurtines, & De Los Angeles Aranade, 1978).
There are two versions of the General Ethnicity Questionnaire: one "original" version and one "abridged" version. The "original" version includes: (1) a question asking participants what their "culture" means to them, and (2) 75 multiple-choice questions that ask about participants' language use, social affiliation, engagement in cultural practices, and cultural identification. The American version of the questionnaire includes several additional items that assess what "being American" means to respondents. The "abridged" version was developed in collaboration with Dr. Yu-Wen Ying and Dr. Peter A. Lee for use with Chinese Americans. The "abridged" version includes 37 items (a subset of the original 75 multiple choice questions), plus one item that asks participants whether or not they are bilingual. To date, most studies that have used the GEQ have used the abridged version. Therefore, only the abridged version is available for use at this time.
Happiness is a positive and pleasant emotion, ranging from contentment to intense joy. Moments of happiness may be triggered by positive life experiences or thoughts, but sometimes it may arise from no obvious cause. The level of happiness for longer periods of time is more strongly correlated with levels of life satisfaction, subjective well-being, flourishing and eudaimonia. In common usage, the word happy can be an appraisal of those measures themselves or as a shorthand for a "source" of happiness. As with any emotion, the precise definition of happiness has been a perennial debate in philosophy.
Questionnaire construction refers to the design of a questionnaire to gather statistically useful information about a given topic. When properly constructed and responsibly administered, questionnaires can provide valuable data about any given subject.
Survey methodology is "the study of survey methods". As a field of applied statistics concentrating on human-research surveys, survey methodology studies the sampling of individual units from a population and associated techniques of survey data collection, such as questionnaire construction and methods for improving the number and accuracy of responses to surveys. Survey methodology targets instruments or procedures that ask one or more questions that may or may not be answered.
A personality test is a method of assessing human personality constructs. Most personality assessment instruments are in fact introspective self-report questionnaire measures or reports from life records (L-data) such as rating scales. Attempts to construct actual performance tests of personality have been very limited even though Raymond Cattell with his colleague Frank Warburton compiled a list of over 2000 separate objective tests that could be used in constructing objective personality tests. One exception however, was the Objective-Analytic Test Battery, a performance test designed to quantitatively measure 10 factor-analytically discerned personality trait dimensions. A major problem with both L-data and Q-data methods is that because of item transparency, rating scales and self-report questionnaires are highly susceptible to motivational and response distortion ranging all the way from lack of adequate self-insight to downright dissimulation depending on the reason/motivation for the assessment being undertaken.
A questionnaire is a research instrument that consists of a set of questions for the purpose of gathering information from respondents through survey or statistical study. A research questionnaire is typically a mix of close-ended questions and open-ended questions. Open-ended, long-term questions offer the respondent the ability to elaborate on their thoughts. The Research questionnaire was developed by the Statistical Society of London in 1838.
Response bias is a general term for a wide range of tendencies for participants to respond inaccurately or falsely to questions. These biases are prevalent in research involving participant self-report, such as structured interviews or surveys. Response biases can have a large impact on the validity of questionnaires or surveys.
Personality Assessment Inventory (PAI), developed by Leslie Morey, is a self-report 344-item personality test that assesses a respondent's personality and psychopathology. Each item is a statement about the respondent that the respondent rates with a 4-point scale. It is used in various contexts, including psychotherapy, crisis/evaluation, forensic, personnel selection, pain/medical, and child custody assessment. The test construction strategy for the PAI was primarily deductive and rational. It shows good convergent validity with other personality tests, such as the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory and the Revised NEO Personality Inventory.
Affective science is the scientific study of emotion or affect. This includes the study of emotion elicitation, emotional experience and the recognition of emotions in others. Of particular relevance are the nature of feeling, mood, emotionally-driven behaviour, decision-making, attention and self-regulation, as well as the underlying physiology and neuroscience of the emotions.
In social science research, social-desirability bias is a type of response bias that is the tendency of survey respondents to answer questions in a manner that will be viewed favorably by others. It can take the form of over-reporting "good behavior" or under-reporting "bad", or undesirable behavior. The tendency poses a serious problem with conducting research with self-reports. This bias interferes with the interpretation of average tendencies as well as individual differences.
A self-report study is a type of survey, questionnaire, or poll in which respondents read the question and select a response by themselves without any outside interference. A self-report is any method which involves asking a participant about their feelings, attitudes, beliefs and so on. Examples of self-reports are questionnaires and interviews; self-reports are often used as a way of gaining participants' responses in observational studies and experiments.
According to some theories, emotions are universal phenomena, albeit affected by culture. Emotions are "internal phenomena that can, but do not always, make themselves observable through expression and behavior". While some emotions are universal and are experienced in similar ways as a reaction to similar events across all cultures, other emotions show considerable cultural differences in their antecedent events, the way they are experienced, the reactions they provoke and the way they are perceived by the surrounding society. According to other theories, termed social constructionist, emotions are more deeply culturally influenced. The components of emotions are universal, but the patterns are social constructions. Some also theorize that culture is affected by the emotions of the people.
Affect measures are used in the study of human affect, and refer to measures obtained from self-report studies asking participants to quantify their current feelings or average feelings over a longer period of time. Even though some affect measures contain variations that allow assessment of basic predispositions to experience a certain emotion, tests for such stable traits are usually considered to be personality tests.
The self-discrepancy theory states that individuals compare their "actual" self to internalized standards or the "ideal/ought self". Inconsistencies between "actual", "ideal" and "ought" are associated with emotional discomforts. Self-discrepancy is the gap between two of these self-representations that leads to negative emotions.
Interpersonal emotion regulation is the process of changing the emotional experience of one's self or another person through social interaction. It encompasses both intrinsic emotion regulation, in which one attempts to alter their own feelings by recruiting social resources, as well as extrinsic emotion regulation, in which one deliberately attempts to alter the trajectory of other people's feelings.
Aversion to happiness, also called fear of happiness, is an attitude towards happiness in which individuals may deliberately avoid experiences that invoke positive emotions or happiness. Aversion to happiness is not a recognized mental health disorder on its own, but it can contribute to and/or exacerbate existing mental health issues.
The ADHD Rating Scale (ADHD-RS) is a parent-report or teacher-report inventory created by George J. DuPaul, Thomas J. Power, Arthur D. Anastopoulos, and Robert Reid consisting of 18–90 questions regarding a child's behavior over the past 6 months. The ADHD Rating Scale is used to aid in the diagnosis of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) in children ranging from ages 5–17.
The School Refusal Assessment Scale-Revised (SRAS-R), developed by Christopher Kearney and Wendy Silverman, is a psychological assessment tool designed to evaluate school refusal disorder symptoms in children and identify their reasons for avoiding school. This self-report inventory, which is also available in parent response form, consists of 24 questions that measure the frequency with which a child experiences emotions and behaviors related to school attendance. Respondents are asked to answer each of the 24 items on a scale of 0 ("never") to 6 ("always").
Measures of guilt and shame are used by mental health professionals to determine an individual's propensity towards the self-conscious feelings of guilt or shame.
A feeling thermometer, also known as a thermometer scale, is a type of visual analog scale that allows respondents to rank their views of a given subject on a scale from "cold" to "hot", analogous to the temperature scale of a real thermometer. It is often used in survey and political science research to measure how positively individuals feel about a given group, individual, issue, or organisation, as well as in quality of life research to measure individuals' subjective health status. It typically uses a rating scale with options ranging from a minimum of 0 to a maximum of 100. Questions using the feeling thermometer have been included in every year of the American National Election Studies since 1968.
The Differential Emotions Scale (DES) is a multidimensional self-report device for assessment of an individual's emotions. The DES helps measure mood based on Carroll Izard's differential emotions theory, The DES consists of thirty items, three for each of the ten fundamental emotions as visualized by Izard: interest, joy, surprise, sadness, anger, disgust, contempt, fear, shame/ shyness, and guilt, which are represented on 5-point Likert scale. There are currently four different versions of the scale. Despite the different versions, the basic idea of are very similar. Participants are asked to rate each of the emotions on a scale, and depending on the instructions given, they either rate their current feelings, feelings over the past week, or over long-term traits. The DES is similar to other scales such as the Multiple Affect Adjective Check List (MAACL) and the Multiple Affect Adjective Check List-Revised (MAACL-R) which are used to assess either the state or trait affect by varying the time of which instructions are given to the participants.
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