A Circumplex Model of Affect

Abstract

Factor-analytic evidence has led most psychologists to describe affect as a set of dimensions, such as displeasure, distress, depression, excitement, and so on, with each dimension varying independently of the others. However, there is other evidence that rather than being independent, these affective dimensions are inter- related in a highly systematic fashion. The evidence suggests that these inter- relationships can be represented by a spatial model in which affective concepts fall in a circle in the following order: pleasure (0°), excitement (45°), arousal (90°), distress (135°), displeasure (180°), depression (225°), sleepiness (270°), and relaxation (315°). This model was offered both as a way psychologists can represent the structure of affective experience, as assessed through self-report, and as a representation of the cognitive structure that laymen utilize in conceptualizing affect. Supportive evidence was obtained by scaling 28 emotion- denoting adjectives in four different ways: Ross' technique for a circular ordering of variables, a multidimensional scaling procedure based on perceived similarity among the terms, a unidimensional scaling on hypothesized pleasure-displeasure and degree-of-arousal dimensions, and a principal-components analysis of 343 subjects' self-reports of their current affective states.