Research Material
On this page we propose research materials and tools that we are willing to share, free of charge, with qualified emotion researchers, irrespective of their discipline, for use in non-commercial research projects.
We have developed, validated and published a number of instruments to test emotion recognition ability in different modalities. Many of these instruments are shared with qualified researchers. More information can be found on our special site for Emotional Competence (EC), under Research Tools, on this page.
We have also developed a research corpus with many major emotions enacted by professional actors, using affect induction procedures – the Geneva Multimodal Emotion Portrayals (GEMEP), recorded on high quality video. Parts of this corpus are also shared with qualified researchers and are widely used in the community. More information is provided here.
Below we list materials and tools for emotion research in general, developed in the course of our earlier research, that are currently available for downloading. A brief commentary explains what you can expect to receive if you click on the highlighted text.
1. Geneva Appraisal Questionnaire
The Geneva Appraisal Questionnaire (GAQ) can be used to assess, as much as is possible through recall and verbal report, the results of an individual's appraisal process in the case of a specific emotional episode (as based on Scherer's Component Process Model of Emotion). The files available for download contain the current English, French, and German versions (and information on utilization).
GAQ English version
GAQ Version Française
GAQ Deutsche Version
2. Code for the Classification of Emotion Antecedent Situations and Responses
This PDF file reproduces a code to categorize emotion-antecedent situations according to some of their salient features as well as to categorize responses. The coding system has been developed by a group of international researchers for the purpose of a cross-cultural study. Further information is provided on the cover sheet of the file.
3. List of Affect and Emotion Terms in 5 languages
This file provides over one hundred lexical labels for affective states and emotions in English, French, German, Italian, and Spanish. Further information is provided on the cover sheet of the file (Word document).
4. Geneva Affect Label Coder (GALC)
GALC proposes to recognize 36 affective states commonly distinguished by words in natural languages by parsing text data bases for these words and their synonyms (searching for roots of the words). All classes and the synonyms used are based on thesauri for English, French, and German. For a more detailed discussion of the development of GALC, see Scherer, K.R. (2005). What are emotions? And how should they be measured? Social Science Information, 44(4), 695-729. You can download GALC, an Excel file with a built in Macro. Additional languages can be added.
5. The Geneva Emotion Wheel (GEW)
Based on Scherer's Component Process Model, the Geneva Emotion Research Group has developed this instrument to obtain self-report of felt emotions elicited by events or objects. For further information and to download the GEW, please click on the link above.
6. International Survey On Emotion Antecedents And Reactions (ISEAR)
Over a period of many years during the 1990s, a large group of psychologists all over the world collected data in the ISEAR project, directed by Klaus R. Scherer and Harald Wallbott. Student respondents, both psychologists and non-psychologists, were asked to report situations in which they had experienced all of 7 major emotions (joy, fear, anger, sadness, disgust, shame, and guilt). In each case, the questions covered the way they had appraised the situation and how they reacted. The final data set thus contained reports on seven emotions each by close to 3000 respondents in 37 countries on all 5 continents.
7. The Geneva Affective PicturE Database (GAPED): A 730 picture database for emotion induction
In emotional research, efficient designs often rely on successful emotion induction. However, extensive use of previously validated databases lowers the impact of the images by increasing the knowledge that participants have of them. Moreover, limited availability of large sets of pictures representing specific themes is a concern for studies centered on specific emotion thematics, and for designs requiring a lot of trials from the same kind (e.g. EEG recordings). Thus, a new database of 730 pictures, the Geneva Affective PicturE Database (GAPED), was created to increase the availability of visual emotion stimuli. Four specific negative contents were chosen: spiders, snakes, and scenes that induce emotions related to violation of moral and legal norms (human rights violation or animal mistreatment). Positive and neutral pictures were also included: positive pictures represent mainly human and animal babies as well as nature sceneries, while neutral pictures mainly depict inanimate objects. The pictures were rated according to valence, arousal, and the congruence of the represented scene with internal (moral) and external (legal) norms.
The database and the ratings are available here for download. Please read the "readme.txt" file before use of the database.
For validation and citation, please refer to:
Dan-Glauser, E. S., & Scherer, K. R. (2011). The Geneva affective picture database (GAPED): a new 730-picture database focusing on valence and normative significance. Behavior Research Methods, 43(2), 468-477. doi: 10.3758/s13428-011-0064-1
GEOS is a set of scales that are used to verbally measure the specific subjective affective feelings elicited via olfactory stimulation in different cultures. The scales are now available in French (Switzerland) and English (UK and Singapore).
9. IAPS and Spatial Frequencies
The influence of the emotional attributes of a visual scene on early perception processes remains a key question in contemporary affective neurosciences. The International Affective Picture System (IAPS; Lang et al., 2005) was developed to provide a set of standardized stimuli for experimental investigations of emotional processes. These stimuli have been widely used in brain activity investigations to study the influence of valence and/or arousal on visual processing. However, visual perception is strongly influenced by the physical properties of the images shown, especially their spatial frequency content, an aspect that has been unexpectedly neglected at large. We examined the complete set of IAPS with a discrete wavelet transform to highlight relations between the energy in different spatial frequencies and the emotional features of the pictures. Those results and all the scripts to calculate the values for other stimuli are provided.
10. The French version of the Difficulties in Emotion Regulation Scale (DERS-F)
Successful emotion regulation is a key aspect of efficient social functioning and personal well-being. Difficulties in emotion regulation lead to relationship impairment and are supposed to be involved in the onset and maintenance of some psychopathological disorders as well as inappropriate behaviors. Gratz and Roemer (2004) developed the Difficulties in Emotion Regulation Scale (DERS), a comprehensive instrument measuring emotion regulation problems that encompasses several dimensions on which difficulties can occur. We developed a French translation of this scale and provided an initial satisfactory validation of this instrument. The DERS-F reliably maps difficulties in emotion regulation in both the clinical and research contexts.
For validation and citation, please refer to:
Dan-Glauser, E. S., & Scherer, K. R. (2013). The Difficulties in Emotion Regulation Scale (DERS): Factor Structure and Consistency of a French Translation. Swiss Journal of Psychology, 72(1), 5-11.
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