LEGO Pictorial Scales for Assessing Affective Responses

This article presents the design and evaluation of novel types of pictorial scales for assessing emotional response based on LEGO Minifigures. We describe the creation of two pictorial scales (LEGO Face Scale and Stylized LEGO Face Scale) through the use of a semi-automatic process. We report on the results of two evaluation studies conducted to assess the validity of the proposed pictorial scales. The first study evaluated the rating of emotions expressed by other humans; the second focused on rating one’s own emotional state when looking at expressive stimuli. We investigate the validity of the two pictorial scales by comparing them to ratings given on a conventional Likert Scale. Results show that assessing expressive faces using the proposed pictorial scales can differ from using a Likert scale; however, when rating one’s own emotional state there is no difference. Finally, we assembled a physical version of the LEGO Face scale and discuss future work.