albertobeta / affectiveslider

A scientifically-validated digital scale for the self-assessment of emotion.

The Affective Slider (AS)

The Affective Slider (AS) is a new digital scale for the self-assessment of emotion composed of two slider controls that measure pleasure (sad - happy) and arousal (sleepy - wideawake). It can be easily included in electronic surveys and questionnaires. The AS is released under a Creative Commons license and can be freely adopted in a broad range of fields, including (but not limited to) marketing research, user experience testing, science and psychology.

The AS has been empirically validated and presented in the following open access scientific publication:

Alberto Betella and Paul F.M.J. Verschure, "The Affective Slider: A Digital Self-Assessment Scale for the Measurement of Human Emotions", PLoS ONE, vol. 11, p. e0148037, 2016. DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0148037

Design and implementation guidelines

See the existing implementations of the AS, including Qualtrics. Please feel free to contribute with your own custom implementation.

Custom-tailored implementations of the AS can be developed using any programming framework (e.g. iOS or Android SDK), as long as they fully comply with the following guidelines:

• Both the pleasure and arousal slider controls must have an horizontal orientation and be presented simultaneously with the slider thumbs (i.e. the movable elements) always placed at the center of the tracks. For right-to-left writing cultures the AS can be horizontally mirrored;
• The spacing between the two sliders and their size must be adequate (and proportional to the screen) to allow the user to easily select the desired values;
• Each one of the sliders must be followed by the intensity cue including the associated emoticons placed at the two extremities;
• All the elements composing the AS must adopt exclusively a greyscale color palette. In case the AS is used on a black or dark background, the default color palette should be inverted (i.e. black to white);
• Each slider measures a single value on a continuous normalized scale ranging from 0 to 1 with a central value (i.e. default thumb position) equal to 0.5 and a minimum resolution of 100 steps (i.e. least step = 0.01). This resolution can increase (e.g. least step ≤ 0.001) in case of devices with high-resolution screens, such as desktop PCs and tablets;
• To allow for an easy manipulation, the sliders thumbs must have the shape of a perfect circle or square (with optional rounded corners) and be at least 10% bigger than the track bar height.

Moreover, in order to discourage potential biases in ratings, we strongly suggest to implement the following recommendations:

• The presentation order of the two sliders should be randomized (i.e. pleasure above and arousal below, or vice versa);
• User interactions with the thumbs such as clicks or taps should be detected to provide immediate visual feedback (e.g. upon interaction, the thumb filling color changes from white to black) and to identify potential dummy ratings (e.g. to prevent the user to continue until a rating is performed or to mark the data point as non-genuine for posterior exclusion in case the thumb is not tapped at all).

affectiveslider's Issues

low hanging fruit for possible updates?

This isn't really an issue, more of a vague question about it's uses.

After reading the paper, I wonder if there are any low hanging fruit to be capitalized on for increasing the adoptability to measuring affect over time? One of the most exciting improvements between this and the SAM is its easy transfer to digital devices. As wearable tech has now become widely available, what are the main barriers to somehow incorporating the AS to these wearables (glasses, watches, etc)?

Of course the AS still requires voluntary interaction, which is a barrier to over-time measurement. Until affect can be measured passively it seems unlikely for wearables to really be of much use here. Still, the AS could be integral in a possible stepping stone to constant measuring of affect.

Importing images to Qualtrics?

When I use the .qsf file, I can't figure out how to get the images onto the sides of the slider like your demo image has or the gradient image below the slider. It just imports the slider and nothing else.

Am I doing something wrong, or is the code just for the sliding bar without the images?

Thanks in advance!

Showing current values?

Hi, the current javascript works great for me to use the Affective Slider for our research. An issue that I have encountered is to use the "show value" function with this scale. In our project, we are trying the administer the scale multiple times so we want participants to have a reference point by allowing the current values shown when they are responding to the scale. Is it possible to add the current value constantly shown on the slider along with the mouse move?

Heads up to others trying to use this in Qualtrics --- Qualtrics code probably abandoned?

I reached out to the authors. The qualtrics code was a contribution from an external researcher. One author said they would get back to me if they could find someone to attempt to rework the code for it to work in qualtrics again. That was 5/5/2019. I'm going to guess they won't rework the qualtrics / external contribution.

EMERGENCY: Javascript is not working

I used the Javascript code published in this project in my qualtrics project.
Inicially it was working fine, the AS was correctly displayed on the preview version and in all my trials. But now, while I'm running the survey the items doesn't work.
I tried the code in a new survey and still doesn't work.
what happens?
What can I do?

Dominance ?

Is there any attempt to add dominance dimension in your scale?