The international affective picture system: A flemish validation study

Abstract

The International Affective Picture System (IAPS; Center for the Study of Emotion and Attention [CSEA], 1995) is a set of pictures that is widely used in experimental research on emotion and attention. In this study, the normative ratings of a subset of the IAPS were compared with the ratings from a Flemish sample. Eighty Flemish first-year psychology students from the Ghent University (Belgium) rated valence, dominance and arousal for a stratified sample of 60 IAPS pictures. Reliability coefficients indicate that the self-report ratings are internally consistent. Four findings converge upon the idea that the ratings in the Flemish sample are similar to the normative ratings. First, the affective ratings of the pictures in our sample correlated strongly with the North American ratings: .95, .84 and .87, respectively for valence, arousal and dominance. Second, mean valence and arousal ratings of the 60 pictures did not significantly differ between the Flemish and the North American sample. Third, plotting of the valence and arousal ratings in a two-dimensional figure results in a similar boomerang shaped distribution as the North American affective ratings. And fourth, as predicted, this distribution of the valence and arousal ratings shows the same asymmetry between positive and negative pictures as in North American samples.