AffectButton: A method for reliable and valid affective self-report

In this article we report on a new digital interactive self-report method for the measurement of human affect. The AffectButton (Broekens & Brinkman, 2009) is a button that enables users to provide affective feedback in terms of values on the well-known three affective dimensions of Pleasure (Valence), Arousal and Dominance. The AffectButton is an interface component that functions and looks like a medium-sized button. The button presents one dynamically changing iconic facial expression that changes based on the coordinates of the user’s pointer in the button. To give affective feedback the user selects the most appropriate expression by clicking the button, effectively enabling 1-click affective self-report on 3 affective dimensions. Here we analyze 5 previously published studies, and 3 novel large-scale studies (n=325, n=202, n=128). Our results show the reliability, validity, and usability of the button for acquiring three types of affective feedback in various domains. The tested domains are holiday preferences, real-time music annotation, emotion words, and textual situation descriptions (ANET). The types of affective feedback tested are preferences, affect attribution to the previously mentioned stimuli, and self-reported mood. All of the subjects tested were Dutch and aged between 15 and 56 years. We end this article with a discussion of the limitations of the AffectButton and of its relevance to areas including recommender systems, preference elicitation, social computing, online surveys, coaching and tutoring, experimental psychology and psychometrics, content annotation, and game consoles.