Scales of Pleasure and Arousal 1 Children ’ s Scales of Pleasure and Arousal

This study introduces the Children’s Scales of Pleasure and Arousal as instruments to enable children to provide subjective and descriptive judgments along the major dimensions of affect. Children (N = 160, 3 to 11 years), and an adult comparison group (N = 20), used the scales to indicate the levels of pleasure or arousal they perceived in stylized drawings of facial expressions. All age groups used the Pleasure and Arousal Scale reliably and accurately. The Children’s Scales of Pleasure and Arousal provide a reliable and useful measure of children’s judgments of these two dimensions of emotional facial expressions. Introduction The question addressed in the present article was how to measure the dimensions of pleasure and arousal in a format that young children could use. Pre-literate children cannot make any kind of written response. Thus, if children are to report their current affective state, or make judgments regarding any kind of emotional stimuli, an ageappropriate response format is required. The Children’s Scales of Pleasure and Arousal (CSPA) were designed to record judgments on the bipolar scales of pleasure and arousal about single instances of affect (e.g. the feeling expressed by a single facial expression or word). The CSPA were used in a study of 4and 5-year-olds. Russell and Paris (1994) asked children to use the scales to rate complex emotions (jealous, worried, ashamed, calm, proud, grateful). The children’s scores from the Pleasure Scale and the Arousal Scale were strongly correlated (p < .01) with adults’ ratings of pleasure (r = .96 for 4year-olds; r = .97 for 5-year-olds,) and of arousal (r = .93 and .87, respectively) for these emotions. These results offer preliminary support for the validity of the CSPA. Our intent in the current studies was to examine the CSPA with new stimuli, different emotions, and with slightly younger and much older children (3to 11-years). We asked children (3to 11-years) to judge stylized drawings of faces using either the Pleasure or the Arousal Scale, and compared these ratings to ratings of the same stimuli by adults. Method Participants. There were 160 participants in total. There were 20 children in each of seven age groups: 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 (including 9), 10 (including11) years at last Scales of Pleasure and Arousal 2 birthday, enrolled in preschools and public elementary schools, plus 20 university-aged adults. All the participants were proficient in English. Procedure The experimenter first spent several hours getting to know the children before beginning the study. The child was then randomly assigned to either the Pleasure or the Arousal Scale, and taught how to use that scale. (The Pleasure and Arousal Scales are available upon request.) Pleasure Scale very very bad a little bad normal a little good very very good