A Bipolar Structure of Affective Experience

Abstract

A current debate ensues between the bivalent and the bipolar views of affect. This study has attempted to further support the side of bipolarity. The bipolar model of affective experience explains that affect is experienced along a single continuum and therefore a person processes only one feeling of affect at a time and cannot experience opposite states of affect simultaneously. I predicted that, in accordance with the bipolar model, participants would be unable to process semantic information from both positive and negative narratives at the same time in a dichotic listening. This inability would cause the participants to make shadowing errors when their attention shifted to the unattended channel as well as causing a vocal delay when the narratives switched auditory channels midway through the experiment. They would rate themselves in bipolar space throughout the experiment, but to then rate themselves in bivalent space when they made a summary judgment at the end of the experiment, since they are asked to combine their entire experience into a discreet rating. Twenty-one undergraduate students participated in a dichotic listening task while using the CTVG to continuously record their current state of affect in real time. The percent of errors made in shadowing, vocal delay, position on the grid for the summary judgments and the placement on the grid surrounding attention shifts were all measured. Results suggest that the structure of the affective experience follows the bipolar model. Implications of this research are discussed.